The rebound in meetings demand and expenditure from the lows of 2009 has spread across all industries and around the globe, concurrent with further adoption of strategic meetings management principles, even in areas like South America where the market remains fragmented, according to Meeting Professionals International’s new chairman of the board.
Sebastien Tondeur, CEO of Geneva-based meetings and exhibition management firm MCI Group, on July 1 began a one-year term as MPI chairman. Tondeur in 2006-2007 had served as president of MPI’s European Council.
With MCI, Tondeur has an insider’s view of the European corporate meetings market. He disputed the notion that the continent’s recovery in meetings demand has lagged those of North America and the Asia/Pacific region. “There was a period of time when there was a very deep cut in the North American market, in the number of events at the height of [the financial] crisis,” he said. “In Europe, we did not have the same drastic reduction. In Europe, the recovery so far is pretty strong, and very similar to what’s happening in North America. I don’t see that North America picked up faster than Europe.”
Tondeur also pointed to solid ongoing recoveries not only in Latin America and Asia/Pacific, but also within such sectors as financial services and pharmaceuticals, industries that he said were among the hardest hit during the economic downturn. “The more event budgets were linked to marketing, the more they were cut, as opposed to B-to-B or staff communication events,” he explained.
As the global meetings industry emerges from the recession, it will become different than what existed before, Tondeur said. Today’s meetings are “more business-focused, trying to optimize those two or three days for business with less time for teambuilding activities or creative components,” he said. “There was a time when there was a reduction in budgets, but organizations and corporations have taken the financial crisis as an excuse to look at their business and see how they operate and to optimize they way they do things, so that there’s even more coherence in budgeting decisions.”
The result, Tondeur said, is a maturing industry that is exploring and implementing procurement philosophies and practices. “There is definitely a market maturity curve that we can draw,” he said, placing North America and Western Europe at its peak. “Asia is at very low maturity but increasing at lightning speed, Argentina and Brazil are falling between Europe, North America and Asia, but there are massive changes there. It’s a very fragmented market, but it’s changing fast.”
Those changes, he said, offer MPI an opportunity to expand its global influence. “In a lot of the new economies and BRIC countries, there’s a first-mover advantage because the industry there has yet to get organized, and they’re looking up to organizations like MPI to help them structure the industry. It’s a big responsibility and opportunity for our organization.”
In addition to expanding its international footprint, Tondeur said he’d like MPI during his term to deliver more research and data—pointing to the competency standards MPI last month released as an example—and strengthening the association’s system of geographic chapters. “We’re still working on proving to the world that we are not only about logistics and travel,” he said, “but we are about the value human capital and creating connections.”
MPI last week announced that Associated Luxury Hotels International executive vice president Kevin Hinton in July 2012 will succeed Tondeur.
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