For the third year running, the students of the 19th edition of the business tourism and congress and event organization master programme (MOCE) of Seville Chamber of Commerce’s business school have performed an in-depth study keyed to identifying and cataloguing Spanish venues suitable for meeting and congresses with more than 500 participants.
To this end, the master programme students have performed a detailed and exhaustive study in Spain’s 50 provinces and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. The study has taken into account all types of venues with meeting and event facilities and services, such as conference centres, hotels, tradeshow centres, auditoriums and other venues. Likewise, the study also identifies the number of 3-, 4- and 5-star hotel rooms available in each destination.
According to the results, Spain currently has a total of 427 venues capable of hosting events in theatre layout for more than 500 attendees.
The autonomous community offering the largest number of venues is Andalusia, with a total of 97, followed by Catalonia (51), Madrid (50), Castile and Leon (39), Valencia (35), the Canary Isles (29), Castile-La Mancha (29), Galicia (26), Aragon (12), Basque Country (12), Extremadura (10), Navarre (9), Asturias (8), the Balearic Islands (8), Cantabria (5), Murcia (4) and Ceuta, Melilla and La Rioja (1).
Obtaining and verifying the data has been a long and arduous task, made even more difficult by the fact that the destinations are largely unaware of their resources and by the scant coordination between local agents responsible for promotion.
The results of the study show that Spain has magnificent meeting and event facilities. Nonetheless, they also point to an imbalance between the potential capacity of some of the venues and available hotel rooms. Furthermore, this study identifies oversupply as one of the industry’s weaknesses in Spain, since the country has over 400 venues with a main function room or auditorium capable of hosting events with over 500 people, while in other countries of a similar size and characteristics the number of venues is over 90% less. This allows Spain’s most direct competitors to invest more resources in promoting their destinations or including value added in specific products.
The aim of the business tourism and congress and event organization master programme of Seville Chamber of Commerce’s business school is to offer students a deeper and more practical perspective of all of the segments comprising the MICE industry, thanks to a faculty featuring well-known professionals from Spain and abroad.
