China: Ready for MICE

(Originally published in 2008)

China is fast becoming a key destination for MICE travel, as much as it is becoming an important source of outbound MICE business. Major cities like Shanghai and Beijing are already well equipped with hotels and facilities for conventions and exhibitions of all sizes. There are rich cultural heritage and growing number of new activities, theme dinner sites and restaurants to attract foreign MICE visitors. Smaller towns and cities such as Hangzhou and Suzhou are also developing as excellent alternative or supporting destinations to the big cities.

Despite these rapid developments, China’s MICE industry is still at its infancy. At the recent IT&CM China 2008 exhibition held in Shanghai, both Mr Huang Guang Rong, Sec-Gen of the Shanghai Municipal Tourism Association, and Dr Liu Dake, Dy Dean of the School of Tourism Management, Beijing International Studies University, concurred that the mindset on MICE has to change in order to recognize the merits this industry sector could bring to the economy. For a start, China’s statistics department does not even have a breakdown on business and MICE visitors. Hence, it is difficult to measure the actual growth and potential of the market.

As MICE strives to establish itself as a distinct industry sector separate from general travel industry, it is also struggling to get skill professional event managers. An expatriate hotel conventions director in Hangzhou laments that the event managers in China still lacks the professionalism and discipline compared to their counterparts in mature markets such as Singapore.

While official figures showed rosy picture for the travel industry in general, industry sources said that 2008 has not been a good year for China so far, despite the Olympics. In Shanghai and Beijing, new hotels have being springing up like sprouts. The US sub-prime issue has also affected room take-up.Nevertheless, China’s large population and domestic travel should help buffer some of these adverse effects.