Seoul is the highest-ranking Asia Pacific city in the latest International Congress and Convention Association’s (ICCA) worldwide city rankings for estimated number of meetings participants.
Beijing and Singapore also came in the top 10, while Japan, China and Korea all came in the top 10 for the country rankings.
City rankings
The cities that are estimated to have welcomed the most number of participants for international association meetings in 2016 are as follows:
- Vienna – 119,880
- Seoul – 104, 780
- Barcelona – 99,468
- Copenhagen – 99,359
- London – 91,756
- Amsterdam – 77,644
- Paris – 75,710
- Rome – 68,612
- Beijing – 65,947
- Singapore – 61,294
In May, ICCA published its annual country and city rankings by number of meetings for 2016. Vienna comes second in the rankings; Seoul comes tenth; and Barcelona third. This data suggests Seoul hosts relatively large meetings.
Country rankings
The top three countries by estimated total number of participants is the same as the ranking by number of meetings: the US is first; Germany is second and the United Kingdom is third.
The top 10 countries are as follows:
- US – 401,332
- Germany – 280,108
- United Kingdom – 228,642
- Italy – 219,041
- Spain – 217,724
- Japan – 205,537
- France – 176,660
- China – 167,114
- Republic of Korea – 160,681
- The Netherlands – 156,039
Meetings numbers
ICCA captured a record 12,212 rotating international association meetings taking place in 2016, up 136 from 2015.
To be included, association meetings must be held on a regular basis, have at least 50 delegates, and rotate between at least three countries.
The report also shows that the number of international associations meetings held annually has doubled over the past decade: from just under 6,000 in 2006 to over 12,000 in 2016.
This means that the trend of exponential growth, as identified in ICCA’s advocacy report A modern history of international association meetings: 1963-2013, published in 2013, continues to apply: The number of association meetings continues to double every decade. The report can be downloadedhere.
Analysis
Though international association meetings are growing in number, they are generally getting smaller. The average number of participants to an international association meeting decreased from 672 in 2006 to 404 in 2016.
More extensive rankings by participant numbers, as well as the worldwide and regional rankings by number of meetings, are included in ICCA’s public abstract of its 2016 Statistics Report, which can be downloaded from ICCA’s Knowledge Hub.
