As ICCA’s annual data gathering and statistical cycle has come to an end, it is time to reflect on the exceptional and perhaps transformational year that was 2020.

For this year, it was decided to add an additional analytical layer to the statistical data in the Destination Comparison Tool (DCT), in the form of this report.

The content of this report complements this year’s DCT and will dive deeper into the data in order to provide you with further insights in what the year 2020 has brought the associations meetings industry.

This year’s DCT will be slightly different compared to previous years, as it will only consist of meetings that were either held or planned in 2020. The previous DCT, containing data on the years 1963-2019 will still be accessible in the new DCT for your convenience and reference.

The DCT remains a dynamic tool which allows you to make your own selections (filter on: pax, subject and the possibility to compare 5 destinations, etc.) As an addition, the Association Database in the majority of cases, displays the motivation of the organizers of planned 2020 meetings with regards to their affected status.

To view the database and the DCT, we invite you to log-in to the MyICCA section of the website to access these valuable tools.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly every association meeting from its onset early last year, it was decided to exclude the previous years for comparison as this would lead to skewed comparisons.

By leaving out the previous years there was room to add information with regards to how meetings were impacted by the pandemic. Meetings have been affected in multiple ways and ICCA has applied the following classification for all meetings:

In total, 8.409 unique meetings were identified which were either held or planned in 2020. In last year’s report the number of unique events was 13.252. This significant drop-off can partially be explained by the fact that numerous event websites were taken offline prematurely or were never established in the first place as a consequence of the pandemic, making it difficult to identify these meetings for 2020.

Most conference organisers have updated the webpage for the postponed or cancelled 2020 conference with new dates or location for future years which made researching conferences and even finding the original dates for the 2020 event, more difficult.

Collecting the data has been particularly challenging for our members in 2020 as, due to the lockdowns, the vast majority of venues and hotels were closed and most of the staff on furlough, working at very reduced hours, or sadly been made redundant.

This unfortunately meant that the response rate from the venues overall was extremely low compared to previous years.

Read the full report here