The International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) has released its annual ranking of top cities and countries for meetings.
The ICCA analyzed 12,212 rotating international association meetings taking place in 2016, an all-time record and an additional 136 meetings compared to 2015. The number of association meetings doubled over the bast decade, from just under 6,000 in 2006 to over 12,000 in 2016.
ICCA’s researchers also spotted an additional 710 meetings for 2015, and 524 for 2014. The ICCA Association Database now includes 20,000 regularly occurring meeting series, 220,000 meeting editions and 11,500 international associations.
Paris, number one in 2014, takes over first place again with 196 meetings in 2016 – one more meeting than last year’s number one Berlin, the ICCA said. Even though the order is quite different, this year’s top 5 cities were also represented in last year’s top 5. Vienna climbs two places to second and Barcelona remains third. Berlin drops from first to fourth place and London remains fifth. Singapore is the first Asian city jumping one place from seventh to sixth. Madrid drops two places from a shared fifth in 2015 to a shared seventh in 2016. Newcomers in the top 10 compared to last year are Amsterdam, 12th last year and now sharing seventh place with Madrid, and Seoul jumping from 13th to 10th. Like last year, Lisbon is ninth.
