Sitges Convention Bureau is celebrating twenty years of expertise, dedication and public-private partnerships, all aimed at helping establish Sitges as a leading MICE destination.
As we celebrate, we’re also taking the opportunity to look back on our work so far and the evolution of the MICE industry in our city, with Sitges currently the second leading destination in Catalonia for business, congress and event tourism. This segment makes up 40% of overnight stays per year, according to data from the Sitges Hospitality Association, and covers an average of 600 meetings per year, nearly 50% of them international.
Over the past twenty years, we’ve helped connect professionals and ideas and, together with our members, have played a leading role in bringing professional events to Sitges. Notable international events have included the m&i European Forum in 2014, with 683 professionals participating, as well as All About People for the British market in 2022 and the Advantage Conference in 2008. And just this year, 2024, we’ve hosted the annual meeting of the Iberian and France-Benelux chapters of the ICCA and the Catalunya Business Meetings for the French market.
As for national events, in 2021 alone Sitges hosted the Travel Advisors Guild’s “We Can Change Travel ; We Come from the Future” event, the EMA board meeting, the IDEMICE assembly and the Iberian MICE National Forum.
In these twenty years, we’ve supported and/or carried out over 360 promotional initiatives and hosted 210 fam trips and press trips. Particularly memorable events of our own creation have been the presentations of Sitges in Madrid in 2008 and the one in 2019, in which we delighted the “6 senses” of 43 event organisers. Our ambassadors on these occasions were Lucrecia, Fernando Guillén and Jordi Milán.
Sitges is synonymous with creativity, and we’ve put it to work all these years. In 2020, when most workshops were cancelled, we created videos with the themes of “Yes to meeting in Sitges”, “Don’t cancel; postpone” and “Sitges MICE fans”, as well as the “Sitges Loves Events” campaign. In 2021, we created “F5 Sitges Refreshing MICE”, embracing technology and research through initiatives such as Psicothon, the first live communication research marathon, organised in collaboration with the EMI and the University of Barcelona; and the “MICE Research Cell”, which has produced studies such as “Elementos que intervienen en el proceso de decisión de un destino o un Venue” [Factors Involved in the Process of Choosing a Destination or Venue] and the book “Así hablan las paredes” [This Is How Walls Speak].
