University of Sunderland
Faculty of Business and Law
‘Sustainability within National Parks.’
Individual report
Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions
TLH219
INTRODUCTION
This research is consisting of two parts. The first part is an overview of current thinking on green issues within the MICE sector. This part is showing what MICE sector is, what is its importance as well as what is sustainability and the connection between Meeting Initiatives Conferencing and Exhibitions and sustainable development. The second part is program for one –day conference which will be held in spring 2014. The target audience of the conference are National Park personnel and leading figures from academic and commercial research establishments – approximately 250 people. The conference is being designed to use eco and sustainable MICE practices.
PART 1
The aim of the literature review is to provide an overview of current thinking on green issues in relation to the MICE sector. In order to do that this work will begin with a description of the MICE sector as well as description of what a conference is. The review will show the importance and size of the MICE sector. This will be achieved through the presence of economic statistics for local and global Economy. Further it will show the meaning of sustainability and why Tourism and MICE sectors need to be developed sustainably. The review will give examples of MICE destinations and sustainability practices within those places. Finally, a summary of the review will be provided to point out the main topics that this work is discussing.
MICE sector or also known as MEEC sector is one biggest sectors within the Tourism and Events industries. The acronym MICE stays for Meetings, Initiatives, Conferences and Exhibitions, but can be found in academic recourses as well as Meetings, Expositions, Events and Conventions sector or MEEC. According to MICE point website (2013), “MICE tourism usually consists of a well planned agenda centered among a particular theme such as hobby, a profession, or an educational topic”. Conferences as part of MICE sector are having big importance to that segment. A definition of conference is “a formal meeting of people with shared interest, typically one that takes place over several days” (Oxford dictionaries). The purpose of conferences can be to meet corporate either associate delegations in order to discuss issues, trends, new topics and ideas. Those delegations are as called buyers while the sellers are the conference venues (Rogers, 2008). The size and the importance of the MICE sector and conferences as part of it can be easily understood through its impact on the Economy - as such a big sector within Tourism, the MICE sector has significant impacts on local and global Economy.
The economic impact of the sector is huge for tourist destinations is huge. It has been evaluated for first time by the ICCA – The international Congress and Convention Association. Only in UK the Meetings sector generated 58.4 billion pounds to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 20.6 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA) (International Congress and Convention Assotiation). The MICE sector is being ranked 17th among more than 100 industries for its contribution to UK’s economy as a whole. Another example of the size and importance of this segment is one of the top tourism destinations in the world – Dubai. The emirate is being putting effort in making developments in the MICE segment in order to attract more visitors to that destination. There MICE tourism contributed the impressive 40% of the tourism sector total income in 2008 and it is expected to grow even more within the next years (The Report: Dubai 2008, 2008).
Globally, MICE sector is a currently growing industry -according to the International Congress and Convention Assotiation (2013) the percentage of the share of MICE sector in the global economy raised from 3.7% to 4.1%, for 2008. MICE segment has a big share in
