For the third time in the last 11 years, Ljubljana as a congress destination has been ranked among the 50 top global destinations for congress activity and in 2011 made great progress on its 2010 position.

Working with all its key partners, Ljubljana Tourism public institute’s congress office is seeking not only to maintain but to actually strengthen Ljubljana’s position in the international congress market, not an easy task given the growing competition at home and more broadly around Europe and above all in Asia.

The first results of the ICCA international congress statistics are very positive for Ljubljana. For the third time in just over a decade it appears among the 50 top global destinations and has jumped significantly compared with the previous year. It is evident that international competition is becoming ever fiercer, as in 2006 when Ljubljana was in 50th place, 27 events were enough for this, whereas in 2011 it required 40 events to attain this position. Ljubljana’s excellent ranking is shared with Hamburg and Krakow, and the part of the table shown below shows which cities are on the move close to us.

With a total of 54 events, Slovenia is in 44th place on the global league table, just behind Estonia, Peru and Serbia and just above Romania. If we focus only on data for Europe, Slovenia is 25th out of 43 named countries on the list, while Ljubljana is 27th of the continent’s 200 cities. The whole statistical analysis will be completed and published towards the end of June 2012.

In Ljubljana we believe that our congress product has already attained good quality (in the senses of infrastructure and organisation), and that growing recognition means Slovenia and Ljubljana are not invisible. Ljubljana Tourism’s congress office, which systematically deals with ICCA statistics, is grateful to all partners that have contributed data on events thereby assisting with the significant improvement in our classification. Primarily behind this stands good business success, which is reflected in the increased range of professional and scientific meetings in Ljubljana. Ljubljana Tourism’s congress office will devote further efforts to more detailed research into meetings in the academic segment that take place at faculties or research institutes, as statistics on these remain partly a ‘grey area’.

The associations segment is part of the congress industry since this includes commercial-company (corporate) and political meetings as well as so called motivational travel.
ICCA – the International Congress and Convention Association – is the most global association in the MICE industry, which has over 900 member companies or organisations from 87 countries, and has been gathering statistics on international congress events since as far back as 1972. ICCA holds a database with around 10,500 association profiles, representing one research source while a second part is also dependent on the successful collection of all necessary data from destinations. Meetings of professional and scientific associations are also taken account of, as long as they fulfil the following criteria: a minimum of 50 participants; the event organisation must run on a regular basis (annual, biennial etc – one-off events are excluded); proven rotation of at least three countries.

The statistics might at first glance seem to be a dry and unattractive theme, but many congress destinations keenly await the publication each spring of the latest ICCA data from the previous year. Not just because they are a detailed analysis, but also because they are immediately communicated to the professional and general public. International congress statistics are therefore an important tool for image building of an individual place or country, but also a comparative reference to the competition.

Further information is available at the following link.

Ljubljana Tourism public institute