Conferences and Conventions

A Global Industry

Tony Rogers, Peter Wynn-Moylan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000620191
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Fully revised and updated to reflect current trends and emerging topics, the fourth edition of Conferences and Conventions: A Global Industry provides an expert-led, comprehensive introduction to, and overview of, the key elements of the global conference, convention and meetings industry.

This book examines the conference industry's origins, structure and future development, as well as its economic, social and environmental impacts. It provides an in-depth analysis of the strategies, practices, knowledge and skills required to organise memorable conferences and similar business events, with detailed descriptions of all the planning and operational processes. Following an international approach, this edition features additional sections on the increase in technological advancements and opportunities, as well as the rise of virtual and hybrid events in a post-pandemic era. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book includes integrated case studies to highlight current issues and demonstrate theory in practice.

Structured logically with useful features throughout to aid learning and understanding, this book is an invaluable resource to students following events management, hospitality and tourism courses, as well as for event planners and practitioners already working in the conference industry.

Chapter 1 A global industry

DOI: 10.4324/9781003298953-1

Chapter overview

This chapter examines how the conference industry has developed through time to become a truly global industry, offering major benefits to event participants and to the communities hosting conferences, conventions and similar business events.

The chapter covers:

• The origins of the conference industry
• The foundations of a proper industry
• The globalisation of the conference industry
• Certain industry shortcomings
• Industry parameters and definitions
• The benefits of conferences and business events
• Threats posed by global pandemics.

It includes case studies on:

• The ISBL National Virtual Conference 2020: unleashing potential (in a virtual world)
• Seoul’s innovative destination marketing in a post-COVID world

LEARNING OUTCOMES

On completion of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Explain why and how the conference industry developed in the way it did
• Understand the international dimensions of the industry and appreciate which are the most successful cities and countries
• Discuss the features of the industry that illustrate the steps still required to achieve full maturation
• Understand the key benefits afforded by conferences and business events, including their impacts and lasting legacies for organisations, attendees and local communities
• Assess the damage and threats posed to live events by pandemics and disasters and how the industry responds to these.

Introduction

The conference industry is a young, dynamic industry which is growing and maturing at a rapid rate. From origins in Europe and North America, it is now a truly international industry witnessing huge investments across all continents. Its youthfulness, however, does mean that it lacks some of the necessary characteristics of more established industries, such as well-defined terminology, adequate market intelligence and a recognition of conference and event organising as a genuine profession.

Conferences generate many benefits and legacies for the destinations that host them, as well as for the individuals who take part in them, and new research initiatives are creating a wider understanding and appreciation of their lasting impacts. Like all industries, conferences can be negatively impacted by global pandemics, and it is a measure of any industry’s robustness and maturity how it adapts and responds to these.

The origins of the conference industry

The world’s political leaders gathering for the latest G7 summit, the (British) Chartered Institute of Housing holding its annual conference in Manchester, delegates attending the International Symposium on Lepton and Photon Interactions 2023 in Melbourne, shareholders of Microsoft or HSBC attending the company’s annual general meeting, the sales force of GlaxoSmithKline coming together for a regular briefing or training event or their high achievers jetting off for an incentive-cum-meeting trip to an exotic overseas destination – all these different events have one thing in common: they are all to do with bringing people together, both face to face and virtually, to exchange ideas and information, to discuss and in some cases negotiate, to build friendships and closer business relationships, to encourage better performance by individuals and organisations. They are different facets of the same dynamic, international, economically vibrant conference industry. The terms used (‘summit’, ‘meeting’, ‘conference’, ‘assembly’, ‘convention’, ‘congress’, ‘symposium’, ‘AGM’, ‘briefing’, ‘training’, ‘incentive’) may vary, and the events themselves may have different formats and emphases, but the essential ingredients and objectives are the same.

Meetings, conferences and conventions are at the forefront of modern communications, whether this is for internal communications (sales meetings, training courses, board retreats, major annual congresses, for example) or as a vehicle for communicating with key audiences (such as press briefings, product launches, annual general meetings, some technical conferences). Meetings, conferences and conventions are generic terms to describe a diverse mix of communications events.

The phrase ‘conference industry’ is of quite recent origins and is certainly not one that would have been heard until the second half of the twentieth century. Yet people’s need to congregate and confer is one of the things that defines our humanity, and, for a multitude of different reasons, meetings and gatherings of people have taken place since the early days of civilisation. Fenich (2012) says that:

once humans developed permanent settlements, each town or village had a public meeting area, often called a town square, where residents could meet, talk and celebrate.

Shone (1998) traces the evolution of meetings since Roman times in Britain and Ireland, together with the development of meeting rooms and meeting places to accommodate such events, driven largely by the needs of trade and commerce.

An article in Conference & Meetings World magazine (Colston, 2010) entitled ‘History in the Making’ lists some of the most significant moments in world history which were decided not on the battlefield but in conference halls. The article references:

• The first Continental Congress (September/October 1774), held in Philadelphia, United States, to protest the ‘Intolerable Acts’ passed by the British government in response to the Boston Tea Party of 1774
• The Quebec Conference (October 1864), held in Quebec City, Canada, leading to the creation of the Dominion of Canada
• The Paris meeting (January 1919 to January 1920), Palace of Versailles, France, which led to the Treaty of Versailles and defined the structure of post-war Europe
• The Yalta Conference (February 1945), in Livadia, Ukraine, the second of the two major wartime meetings between the ‘Big Three’: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, following the Tehran conference of 1943.

One of the highest-profile events in the past couple of hundred years, perhaps almost a launch event for our contemporary conference industry, was the Congress of Vienna, held from September 1814 to June 1815. The Congress was called to re-establish the territorial divisions of Europe at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and representatives included all of the major world powers of the day (with the exception of Turkey). It is tempting to imagine what the ‘delegate spend’ must have been like, with delegates such as Alexander I, Emperor of Russia; Prince Karl August von Hardenberg from Prussia; and Viscount Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington as the principal British representatives. Each representative would have been accompanied by a substantial delegation of support staff and partners, requiring accommodation, social programmes, lavish corporate entertainment and ground handling, not to mention state-of-the-art conference facilities. The Vienna Convention Bureau no doubt celebrated long and hard its success in attracting such a high-profile, high-spend event to the city!

As the nineteenth century progressed, universities increasingly provided facilities for the dissemination of information within academic circles, while the boom in spa towns and, in the United Kingdom, Victorian resorts with assembly rooms, began to make available larger public spaces for entertainment and meetings. At the same time, the development of the railway network was accompanied by the construction of railway hotels alongside major stations. Many of these hotels had substantial function rooms available for hire.

Shone (1998) contends that the dawn of the twentieth century was accompanied by a change in the demand for meetings:

Though assemblies and congresses continued to be driven by trade and industry, there was a slow and gradual increase in activity which, rather than promoting products, or reporting a company’s annual progress, looked to developing staff and sales. The precursors of the sales training meeting, the ‘congress of commercials’ (or commercial travellers) of the 1920s and 1930s, began to develop into something more modern and recognisable.

The situation was somewhat different in North America during the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly across the eastern seaboard of the United States, where various trade and professional associations, as well as religious groups, were being formed and, as they became more established, beginning to hold conventions for their memberships. Gartrell (1994) records that, in due course, a number of committees were also created to lure the growing convention business from these expanding and thriving associations. As more and more cities became aware of the value of convention business, Gartrell suggests that it was

inevitable that the solicitation of these conv...