ICCA presents top destinations for international association meetings 2021

To shed more light on how the pandemic affected the association meetings industry in 2021, the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) is publicly releasing new information or the Public Abstract of the ICCA Annual Statistics report. The said report is now available for non-ICCA members after a one-year hiatus. ICCA refined its approach to the report by including meetings that were affected by the pandemic as well as those that remained unaffected due to the transformational events of 2020. Now, non-ICCA members can also benefit from this new methodology, called the Destination Performance Index (DPI), which provides a more holistic view of how destinations have addressed recent challenges.

The Public Abstract additionally presents the top destinations for association meetings in 2021 which is based on estimated total number of attendees for hybrid and virtual events. The report presents a three-year economic impact analysis, which is usually not available to non-ICCA members.

Around 8,000 international association meetings scheduled for 2021 were examined by the DPI. The assessment was based on six performance indicators (planned, unaffected, virtual, hybrid, digitalisation, and business continuation). Combining all the indicators, it represents the overall DPI and highlights how destinations have performed with regard to winning the original bid, COVID policies, adaptability, and technological capabilities to convert on-site events into virtual/hybrid events.

Among the destinations recognized were the USA, Spain, Japan, the Republic of Korea, China-P.R., and European destinations like Denmark and Greece. 

The full report ICCA Annual Statistics report, available only to ICCA members, contains additional analysis on the top destinations, economic impact, regional/global business-continuation and meeting subject matters.

Click here for the full report.

Author: Deb Davad