South Africa Tourism will be fully represented at the world’s leading exhibition for the global conference, incentives, events, and business travel & meetings industry – EIBTM 2007 (European Incentive Business Travel Market).
The destination marketing organization goes to Barcelona with 14 trade partners to showcase South Africa’s capacity as a world-class business incentive destination… and this country’s ambition to become one of the world’s premier incentive destinations. The South African pavilion will show the destination’s diversity of business tourism offerings and will include representation from destination management companies, convention bureaus, convention centers, hotels and professional conference organizers.
There will be, for the first time this year at EIBTM, a macro investigation of the economic importance of the global meeting industry. South Africa has been chosen as one of six countries to both serve as a case study and to participate in a special steering committee on this matter at EIBTM. Australia, Canada, Mexico, Spain and Austria are the other countries chosen for the study.
The global investigation will be conducted by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, by Meeting Professional International and by the International Congress and Convention Association. Angeline Lue will represent South Africa on the steering committee.
“We are extremely pleased to be chosen as a pilot country for this study,” she says. “Meetings are a vital, and lucrative, component of the business tourism mix and our nomination as a pilot country is reflective of the growing profile of our destination and the number and caliber of international conferences and conventions that we host in South Africa. It is our intention to use EIBTM to fast track this growth and embed business tourism’s contribution to our national economy.”
South Africa’s three main convention centres are located in the centres of Durban, Cape Town and Sandton. There are plans to build additional convention centres in the cities of Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Bloemfontein, too.
South African Tourism recently acquired Meetings Africa, South Africa’s premier meetings industry trade fair platform. EIBTM will be used as a platform to showcase Meetings Africa, to encourage as many people as possible to attend the trade fair and to educate EIBTM delegates about Meetings Africa’s International Hosted Buyers Programme.