The U.S. still holds more association meetings than any other country, according to the latest ICCA GlobalWatch report. But no U.S. cities made the top 10 list.
The U.S. may hold more association meetings than any other country, hosting 709 events, but that’s just one small piece of the total story told by the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) ICCA GlobalWatch: Business Analytics – Country & City Rankings 2024, released during IMEX Frankfurt last month.
Interestingly, no U.S. city made the top 10 list — which was led by Vienna, Austria, followed by Lisbon, Portugal and Singapore, with Barcelona, Prague, Paris, Seoul, Bangkok, Rome and Athens (Greece, not Georgia) rounding out that list. Other countries that made the top 10 country list include Italy, Spain, Germany, the U.K., France, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal and Canada.
Part of the reason may be that the latest edition, which is based on data collected from over 11,000 international association meetings held globally throughout 2024, only considers meetings organized by associations with more than 50 participants that rotate between at least three countries. While this is consistent with how ICCA has always calculated its rankings, it also means that many large association events that rotate only within the one country or are held within different cities within one country year to year aren’t included.
This may also be why ICCA for the first time this year provided several additional slices of its data. ICCA CEO Dr. Senthil Gopinath explained, “This year’s rankings highlight not only where meetings happen, but why they matter. Destinations that integrate purpose, innovation, and community benefit into their event strategies will define the future of our industry.”
For example, it calculated the economic impact of meetings held in a specific city, and Barcelona came out first at $360 million, far ahead of Vienna at $247 million, even if Vienna led in the total number of meetings held there. London came in second at $298 million, followed by Singapore at $290 million and Madrid at $288 million. Again, no U.S. city made the top 10 in economic impact in this year’s report. Nor did any U.S. city make the top 10 list of cities holding large meetings, defined as 1,000+ attendees — the top honors there went to Lisbon, Barcelona, Singapore, Vienna/Seoul/Milan, Cape Town, Paris, Bangkok, Rome and Melbourne — even though the U.S. came out on top overall as host country for large meetings.
The U.S. also topped the country, though not city, list for holding mid-sized meetings (150-999 attendees). It slips to second place behind Italy only in the country rankings for small meetings of up to 149 attendees.
Taken overall, the results of the ICCA data show progress in the post-pandemic recovery of international association meetings — the 11,099 such meetings held in 2024 were a 9% increase over the previous year. However, that’s still about 2,000 fewer global association meetings than there were in the prepandemic glory days of 2019.
The economic impact shows a similar trajectory, with estimated overall economic impact of $11.6 billion, according to ICCA’s calculations. Attendee spending is up 24% overall over the past 10 years, though it still slightly trails global inflation over the same time, at 25%. Not surprisingly, while they are the smallest in number held at 8%, it’s those 1,000+ meetings that generate the lion’s share of economic impact — almost 60%. More than half of the meetings in the data set were mid-sized, and they generated just slightly less than 50% of the total economic impact. The smallest meetings were the mirror image of their largest peers — while they constituted almost 40% of the total meetings held globally, they only accounted for 7.6% of the total economic impact.
The leading sectors for this global meeting market were medical science, technology and general sciences, making up almost 44% of the total.
ICCA members can download the full report via the ICCA Member Portal.
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