Historical background

It is only in the past 5O years or so that the burgeoning scale of meetings activity, coupled with its geographical expansion across the globe, has resulted in the develop­ment of a specialised meetings industry, created to serve the needs of men and women who travel in order to congregate with those with whom they share a common interest. In recent times, meetings have become a major profit centre, an essential part of the communications process on which our global village depends, however, that '"meetings industry" is a relatively new phrase. Few people in the 1950s would have used such a term.'

The history of organised meetings is much longer than that of the meetings indus­try itself. Large-scale, formal meetings held for strategic and diplomatic purposes, such as the 1814 Congress of Vienna, which re-established the territorial divisions of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon I, or the 1822 Congress of Verona, which convened to discuss the major European powers' military strategy, are early examples of how meetings have been an important element of political life in Europe and beyond for almost 300 years.

On a less grandiose scale, meetings of the merchant and professional classes of Europe had an established place in public life even before the Industrial Revolution. Shone (1998) notes that, at that time, fashionable Georgian towns such as Bath, Buxton and Cheltenham provided assembly rooms for such events. Rooms were also available, then as now, for public meeting purposes in some of the buildings of the scientific societies, such as the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society in London.

However, more generally, inns and hotels were the venues for the vast majority of meetings, which were held cither in dedicated meetings rooms or in the premises' ballrooms if they were attended by large numbers.

But the growth in demand that was eventually to create the need for the modern meetings industry owes much to the influence of the Americans. Smith (1990) reports that the historian Alexis de Tocqueville, in his early nineteenth-century analysis of the political and social system of the USA, notes how keen Americans were to get together in associations and hold meetings. Rogers (1998) also links the origins of today's meetings industry to the trade and professional association conventions in the USA during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The num­ber of such associations was to accelerate during the early decades of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA, between 1900 and 1920, the white-collar workforce more than doubled in size, from 5.1 million to 10.5 million, more than twice the growth rate for the workforce as a whole (Buyer et al., 1993). As the number of professional workers grew in Europe and the USA, so too did their sense of professional iden­tity. As a result, long-established professional societies such as the American Bar Association and the British Medical Association saw their membership expand rapidly during those years. Scores of new professional groups and business associations were also formed, from the American Association of Advertising Agencies (established in 1917) and the National Association of Accountants (1919) to the Institute of Directors (1903) and the Association Franchise des Femmes Ingenieurs (1929).

Observant witnesses to this expansion were quick to understand that there were vast potential benefits for those towns and cities chosen as the venues for these associations' meetings, it was inevitable then that, as Rogers (1998) remarks, in due course a number of committees were created to lure the growing convention business from these expanding and thriving associations. It was in the creation of these committees - the convention bureaux of their day - that the modern meeting industry found its genesis, and the first elements of the vast human and physical infrastructure that we now know as the meetings industry were established.

The scale of business travel and tourism

By anyone's standards, work-related travel and tourism is big business. A few figures will serve to illustrate the global scale of business travel and tourism:

1 The Worldwide Guide to Conference and Incentive Travel Facilities, 1999-2000 guide listed more than 6000 major venues worldwide. This was a clear underestimate as this guide focuses disproportionately on the UK.

2 It is estimated that in the late 1990s, business tourism contributed around £.12 billion to the UK economy alone (Rogers, 1998).

3 In the mid-1990s, the German conference market amounted to DM43 billion {approximately £16 billion) at 1996 prices. This represented more than 1 per cent of the German gross national product (German Convention Bureaux, 1996).

4 Deloitte and Touche estimated that in 1996 the meetings, convention, exhibition and incentive travel market in the USA was worth around $83 billion (around £55 billion) at 1996 prices (Rogers, 1998).

5 A survey of international convention delegates in Australia in 1996 found that they spent an average of over £2000 each on their visit to the city (Sydney Convention and Visitors Bureau, 1997).

6 A single political party conference in the UK injects over £10 million to the destination economy over a period of just three or four days (Rogers, 1998).

7 The global incentive travel market is already worth more than $20 billion even though it is a relatively recent development (SITE, 1998).

8 The average cost of running an association conference in the USA was $130000 (£85000 approximately) in 1997-8, while convention and exhibition delegates spent an average of $696 (around £460) attending events which involved a three-night stay in 1997-8 (International Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaux, 1998).

9 The 1998 Association of British Travel Agents Conference in MarbeUa cost a total of £1.5 million to organize (Conference and Incentive Travel, 1998).

10 Over a seven-day period the launch of the Peugeot 206 car in Birmingham, UK, cost the company £1.6 million (Conference and Incentive Travel, 1998).

11 In France, towards the end of the 1990s, 750 million francs were spent expanding the Palais de Congres in Paris (Conference and Incentive Travel, 1998).

12 Over 7300 organizations exhibited at the International Confex exhibition which took place in London in March 1999 (Conference and Incentive Travel, 1999).

It is clear therefore that business travel and tourism is a major economic phenomenon, around the world.

According to the given above information it is difficult to organize an international event which involves hundreds of participants alone. Different international organizations work in cooperation because their objections differ. For example: