A few days ago, ICCA (International Congress & Conventions Association) published its annual data on the number of events organized in 2016 by nations and cities. Nothing new on the nations side (Italy is always sixth, as it has been for many years), few news from the cities side. The primacy is always a three-player game between Paris (first), Vienna and Barcelona – three beautiful cities, three symbols of old eternal Europe as well as of the free world, deservingly leading as such.
But this year a figure made me think and almost angry: the twentieth place of the only Italian town among the top 20: Rome.
No, it’s not due to the twentieth place in itself. This isn’t the first time our capital closes the ranking of the magnificent twenty.
And it’s neither due to the absence of other Italian cities from the top list.
It is simply because this ranking says nothing of the other major Italian metropolis, Milan, which according to a survey carried out for Bit 2017 by the Laboratory of Analysis on the International Congress Market (Lamci) developed by Catholic University’s High School in Economics and International Relations (Aseri), in 2016 hosted as many as 40,595 events lasting at least four hours with a minimum of ten people each, for a total of 3.13 million participants and 4.37 million attendance.
In Icca’s research field (only international association congresses with over 50 participants, regularly held in different destinations and rotating between at least three different countries) Rome overcomes Milan – we don’t know by how many positions but it doesn’t matter – with 96 events.
96 events. Versus almost 41 thousand.
The question is: what sense does it make today establishing the primacy of a city according to a narrow, anachronistic criterion, involving only a small part – rich though it is – of the Mice business?
What sense does it make, in the era of budget-focused plans and of the ongoing ride to saving and optimizing, refusing to look up and embrace the whole of the Mice thing, thus including governmental and corporate events, incentive trips, team building activities, product launches and more?
What sense does it make measuring the charms of a destination by stubbornly not considering that the selection criteria, on both demand and offer, have changed and that the market as a whole is expressing a lot of other values and trends?
The absence of Dubai from the top 20 cities ranking as well as of the Emirates from the top 20 nations list should clearly state what I mean by “anachronistic criterion”.
We keep talking about innovation, diversification, change and whatsoever, but I would say that first of all, as always, we should start changing our mental approach to things. Statistics would change accordingly and, as a consequence, business would get to change too – better.
We bet?