Cancun Quintana Roo. The meetings industry has a common debate: should their issues be heard by the Ministry of Tourism, or the Ministry of Economy? Those who defend the first idea, argue that, given the nature of involving flights and accommodation, it is inevitably a question of travel; the latter point out that all sectors disrupt this industry, from medicine to mining, and hence its economic impact should be viewed under another lens.
This is just one of the existential battles that the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (also known as MICE) industry is waging to date, adding to others, such as a market downturn persists since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic.
During the 28th edition of the Congress of the National Meeting Industry, the union met to solve a problem: how to make an industry that concentrates around 1.5% of the Gross Domestic Product more noticeable, according to estimates by the National Tourism Business Council (CNET) .
Where does the discontent come from? On the one hand, the entrepreneurs who participate in the industry’s value chain feel invisible, especially to the state tourism secretariats, which they point out as not understanding their economic potential.
“They do not understand meeting tourism, and it is important because everything that works in an event has to do with each one of them,” said Enrique Calderón, vice president of operations for Grupo Posadas, at a public policy forum on the industry. . “Information is not even shared because they compete with each other. At this rate it will take us five years to have a significant number of events”.
The meetings industry generated about 35,000 million dollars before covid-19, lost around 60,000 million pesos due to the pandemic. Now, the recovery is expected towards 2023, but driving growth is another story.
“What is spilled economically within a meeting is economically very different from tourism,” explains Alejandro Ramírez, president of the Mexican Council of the Meeting Industry (Comir). “We can see it with a congress and see what is in a convention center: alternative services, assembly, visual equipment, etc.”
Since this industry is tourism, but not really, the supports that it considers necessary for its growth are very particular, and this is where it has hit a wall by not conveying its urgency to legislators.
An example of this is the zero rate in the meeting industry, which, although it allows events that use imported products and services to be free of taxes in terms of lodging, use of the venue and audiovisual equipment, is not applicable to all. because it can be exercised by a hotel, an enclosure and an international company, but not a national company.
“That creates a dilemma: an intermediary like us, who are in event planning, cannot apply it unless we have international representation. You have to work on that,” says Ramírez.
Teresa Solís, a specialist in tourism and regional development at the Deloitte consultancy, considers that the lack of understanding of the industry is part of what most affects the union, especially when it comes to generating changes. “It’s hard to get the support of the authority, but not because you don’t want to, but because there is no clear understanding of the impact that the meetings industry is generating.”
Meetings in the age of Zoom
During the first weeks of the pandemic, virtual platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams monopolized the screens of the world’s devices, which seemed to condemn the MICE industry to an unfavorable fate.
But it was not like that. In the world, events such as the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, and even an optimized version of the International Tourism Fair (Fitur) were present during 2021. In Mexico, the spearhead for the industry -and even tourism in general – was the World Tourism Summit, held in Cancun in April 2021.
For Ramírez, the market has adapted to a modality that seems to be here to stay: the hybrid. And the meetings industry has been no exception.
“Today we are clear that training processes, work meetings, can be done without any problem on a platform, and you can have them long distance. But the issue of bringing people together to have an exchange of ideas, and during breaks and recesses, people go out, hang out, talk, when we finish we have meetings and people continue doing business. You are not going to do that via Zoom,” he says.
At the same time, workers have had “Zoom fatigue” in recent months, according to an analysis by Andrés Escandón, regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA). ). “Technology for digital events has always existed; the pandemic forced her for association meetings. Contrary to popular belief, however, technology is far from replacing face-to-face events.”
