Every destination has a story to tell and specialist knowledge to attract international meetings. For the South Tyrollean capital Bolzano, with its significant existing tourism business as skiing destination, intellectual capital has also developed around local geography.
Eurac is a private research cluster headquartered in the destination. It boasts eleven institutes of different disciplines, including one for the Alpine environment and one for mountain medicine, which attract significant events in the sector. Eurac is even the driving force behind the remarkable terraXcube facility in Bolzano’s NOI Techpark, a hyperbaric chamber arrangement that can simulate the earth’s most extreme climate conditions.
The importance of knowledge in a destination, the meetings it attracts to that destination, and the way those meetings then develop the destination, are all well understood by Eurac’s Meeting Manager Pier Paolo Mariotti. The Iceberg met up with him at the recent 33rd Summer School of Iceberg partner European Cities Marketing held in London, where Mariotti was serving as the educational event’s Course Director.
Bolzano has survived without a convention bureau since it was shuttered in 2000. Eurac’s ambassador programme has fostered so much meetings business that it is being brought back into existence.
Pier Paolo Mariotti, Meeting Manager, Eurac Reaearch.
