“Nobody is thinking anymore abut business events as some sort of sub-set of tourism”, said world-renown urbanist Prof. Greg Clark CBE FAcSS of The Business of Cities at last week’s IMEX Policy Forum in Frankfurt. Instead, he believes, “business events are the perfect tool to stimulate a high value economy and to solve our social and environmental problems. Business events are at the heart of the reinvention of cities,” he concluded.
Clark has charted the new narrative of business events for a decade
Reflecting on his co-moderation of IMEX alongside Jane Cunningham of Destinations International, he considered that the pre and post the pandemic eras have provided context to assess the transformation of the narrative of the business events sector.
In five summary points he concluded that the demand for events and business travel has bounced back since the pandemic, that there is a new logic that events are critical to the evolution of sectoral growth and destination marketing, that integrity and sustainability are a journey to a city’s unique offer, that technology and AI enable DMOs to augment the value proposition [and place branding] of a city, and finally that there’s a new era of choice emerging whereby destinations are being far more selective about the events they seek to attract which align to the social and economic vision for the city.
Further reading:
IMEX Frankfurt 2023 Policy Forum Highlights
IMEX Frankfurt 2023 Policy Forum Round Table Discussion Notes
