Is Mice Travel In Trouble?

BY 2030, THE NUMBER OF INTERNATIONAL TRAVELERS IS ESTIMATED TO PEAK 1.8 BILLION AND A GOOD CHUNK OF THEM WILL BE ENCOURAGED BY EITHER PROFESSIONAL OR BUSINESS REASONS. HAS COVID-19 ALTERED THAT FORECAST?

According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), by 2030 some 1.8 billion tourists will be traveling around the world. Of these, many will move around not only for leisure, but also for professional and business reasons. That was the thought behind the strength that meeting tourism -also called MICEHAS acquired in recent years, an acronym that stands for Meeting, Incentives, Congresses and Exhibitions, and which supports this growth in the sector.

Two types of meeting tourism are recognized: individual (comprising travelers who, for reasons linked to their professional activities, move within or outside a country to carry out activities related to their profession or business) and group (organization and development of different events, such as congresses and conventions, in which they attend in groups).

Due to its nature related to the concentration of people, the expansion of COVID-19 immediately represented a great challenge for this segment. If the travel industry was one of the sectors pounded the hardest by the pandemic, within the different lines of this activity MICE tourism felt the threat of the health crisis quite closely. For some, it will likely be one of the last to bounce back, because until there is effective medical treatment to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 or a vaccine to be immunized against it, many people will prefer not to attend face-to-face events.

The meeting and conference tourism sector in Mexico, for example, has lost 220 billion pesos in revenue so far this year due to the pandemic, a situation that has also left 408,000 people unemployed. By the end of September, 109,000 events out of the 332,000 scheduled, had been cancelled, losing a 1.6% contribution it makes to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) nationwide.

Trailing behind the Bahamas, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Jamaica, Costa Rica managed to position Guanacaste in the 11th place and San Jose in the 24th place in the Latin American ranking. In 2018, more than 285,000 people visited this nation for business and professional reasons, according to the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT).

For this reason, the tourism authorities of this Central American country decided on September 9 to give the green light to meeting centers and event halls, including hotels, to host attend business and academic activities for a maximum of 75 people, as long as they maintain preventive health measures, such as separating seats at 1.8 m, respecting social bubbles and making a list of attendees with ID and telephone numbers jotted down.

And the fact is that Costa Ricans know that beyond the fact that the participant has a high purchasing power and spends three to four times more than a traditional tourist, the importance of the segment lies in the fact that it can break with seasonality, since the peak season for holding congresses coincides with the low season for the rest of the tourism segments in the country.

As a rule, in Latin America and the Caribbean the great stakeholders of the sector continue to pursue the opportunity to show the international market that their fairs are committed to working together with the objective of facing the new

Due to its nature related to the gathering of people, the expansion of the COVID-19 immediately posed a great challenge to MICE travel. As long as there is no effective medical treatment, many people will prefer not to attend faceto-face events

Before crisis associated the health with the COVID-19 spread worldwide, aircrafts stood out as the means of transportation used by over 70% of MICE travelers

normality in a professional and solidary manner, in search of generating hard-currency income for our peoples.

Across the pond, the IFEMA fairgrounds in Spain, which in the difficult times of the pandemic installed a hospital inside to house thousands of patients and health workers, is already preparing to reactivate its business: the organization of fairs and other professional and leisure meetings, with a large display of new products designed to prevent spread of the disease.

The objective is, as Eduardo López-puertas, IFEMA'S general manager says, to guarantee the health safety of each and every one of the people involved. "We have implemented actions such as measuring temperature and distancing. We will use heat maps to see where there can be more and less gatherings; we have widened the corridors for all the events, conducted the disinfection of the entire location and we will continue working on trying to streamline everything".

AN UPBEAT OUTLOOK

Today, there is a discreet upward trend in individual business tourism: mainly corporate meetings and visits to clients, which leads us to being optimistic. However, it will be very difficult in 2020 to hold large congresses and jam-packed events of any kind as restrictions on movement and entry in some countries, the opening of hotels and air routes and the freedom to organize meetings with large numbers of attendees will remain in place.

There's a strong belief that meetings with a majority of young people may be organized earlier. Recent surveys show that the travel market for 18-35 year olds should bounce back faster than others.

"Young people can take risks even without a vaccine, and they are eager to experience the real world after so many months of living in the virtual world," says tour operator Contiki Travel Tours, a subsidiary of The Travel Corporation that specializes in travel for this age group.

Up to now, the events developed in the digital world have been the ones that have taken more strength, but there's no doubt that in the future, one-on-one meetings will continue to unfold because human contact continues to be fundamental for the exchange and sharing of knowledge. In fact, people believe that face-to-face events are more effective in meeting business objectives, which is why they prefer them.

For some time, attendance at face-to-face events will be lower,

due to the uncertainty and insecurity that traveling by air and being surrounded by many people will generate in some would-be attendees. However, this September, for example, the most globalized tourism event in the Russian nation, the OTDYKH Leisure Fair, took place in a hybrid way (in person and online) at the IEC Expocentre in Moscow.

In its 26th edition, OTDYKH Leisure continued to draw interest in the development of the tourism industry in Russia and in easing the establishment of business contacts for market representatives on an international level. It also offered a comprehensive program for tourism professionals, including a unique combination of educational sessions, country presentations, seminars and networking events.

All indicates that there will be a rapid recovery of MICE tourism as soon as the health situation improves. The keys to recovery can be summarized in three aspects: resilience, confidence and opportunity. They will have to follow biosafety protocols; pilot tests based on successful experiences in other markets or actors; and responsibility and discipline on the part of both entrepreneurs and attendees. ●

It is believed that those meetings with a majority of young people in attendance could be planned sooner. Surveys indicate that the travel market for 18-35 year olds should recover faster than others