Meetings Professionals International President and CEO Bruce MacMillan believes meetings industry business is now operating at levels much stronger than suggested in the general economy.
“The corporate sector is driving business results, particularly in the US where there has been an increase in employment, something not seen for 18 months,” said MacMillan. He was speaking at the start of the last day of MPI’s EMEC conference in Budapest.
MPI acknowledged that “a handful” of North American delegates had meant that MPI’s major education conference in Europe this year had “dipped slightly” in overall attendee numbers, to 343 compared to last year’s conference in Dusseldorf.
“It’s a tough sell to bring meeting professionals out of their offices for four or five days,” said MPI Chief Development Officer Didier Scaillet. “It was also,” said Scaillet, “a big reflection on the US labour market, so tense over recent years”.
MacMillan said that much of the content for EMEC had not been seen before and that “anecdotally” the ‘re-imagining’ approach with the accent on innovation had been “very well received”.
“We took some risks and tried to ‘walk the talk’ this year to get outside the comfort zone,” MacMillan added.
He noted the popularity of the Flash Point idea assembly, a blitz taster session which offered delegates a preview of content from the longer sessions. MacMillan noted that many of the Flash Point speakers from EMEC 2011 had impressed so much, they also spoke at the annual MPI conference Stateside (WEC).
MPI has also been presenting in Budapest the redesign of its certification practice, the Global CMP (Certified Meetings Professional) qualification, which was now, said MacMillan “more globally focused”.
“We are working with the Convention Industry Council to take our programmes into Asia, in particularly Taiwan and Beijing this summer,” he said.
MacMillan added that in the globalisation of the meetings industry “people were hungry for CMP certification”.
The MPI President noted that the MPI Foundation was pressing ahead with a range of global impact studies for the industry. With Canadian studies completed last year and Mexico due to report this year, MacMillan said that figures were indicating an industry now worth US$1 trillion in terms of output.
Macmillan added that the level of sophistication of discussion at the EMEC 2012 conference was generally higher than the larger WEC Stateside. Despite the dip in attendance, he described as a “bold move”, the Board decision to bring EMEC to Hungary for 2012. “It paid off big time,” he said in terms of bringing central European delegates closer into the MPI fold.
MPI now claims 2,500 members in its European chapters.
Content from EMEC 2012 is available from the website mpiweb.org redesigned and relaunched yesterday (30 January).
Christian Bitz (pictured), former model and nutritionist, was one of the most popular speakers at MPI EMEC’s Flash Point.
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