Why Convention Bureaus Are Marketing Their Local Industry and Intellectual Capital

Wrapping up yesterday, the annual IMEX Frankfurt convention is the largest tourism industry buyer/supplier trade show for meeting, conference and incentive travel planners. This year’s event was the biggest ever with more than 3,900 hosted meeting planner buyers participating in over 62,000 individual appointments with the global array of travel suppliers in attendance. Ray Bloom, chairman of IMEX Group, added that there were also “many new buyers from countries such as China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, and Israel at IMEX for the first time, making this the highest ever number of long haul buyers to attend the show.” Also this year, there was a clear foundational shift in how leading destinations are beginning to promote their local knowledge economies equally on par with their meetings infrastructure. Especially prevalent among many of the European convention bureaus and destination marketing organizations (DMOs), the strategy leverages networks of local knowledge pr