Each year, the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) publishes data looking at where international association organisers hold their meetings.
The annual report is published each May and covers association meetings that have at least 50 delegates and rotate between at least three countries.
This year, for the first time, ICCA has published statistics on the estimated number of participants in these meetings and the results have been published this week, ranking the most popular cities and countries.
The chart below shows the most popular cities by number of meeting participants.
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The figures reveal that of this top ten, Barcelona holds the largest meetings, with an average of 700 participants. Meetings in Berlin, by contrast, attract around 400 participants on average. This will be affected by factors such as venue size in these cities and availability of beds.
ICCA also revealed that on a country-by-country basis, the USA hosts the most international association meetings, some 831, attracting some 365,338 participants. This is comfortably ahead of the second-ranked country, Spain, which hosted 578 meetings in 2014, attracting some 289,039 participants. The following three countries were Germany (659/264,156), France (533/233,075) and the UK (543/199,100).