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Prague ranked seventh in the ranking of the most popular congress destinations of the ICCA association
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The experts especially appreciated the flexibility of the Czechs and their ability to transfer events to the virtual environment
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According to aggregated data from the Prague Convention Bureau (PCB) and the Czech Statistical Office (CSO), a total of 1,220 events took place in the local metropolis last year, which is 2.9 percent less than in 2020
Congresses and conferences were among the first events to move to online space during the covid pandemic. Many of them even stayed there, and so whole companies focused on organizing virtual events could be created, to which the world’s leading speakers join. However, the people of Prague definitely do not want to give up the personal meeting, so the Czech capital once again ranked in the top ten congress destinations on the planets. In addition to Prague, Vienna, Lisbon, Singapore and Seoul, for example, also appeared on the list of metropolises where event agencies managed to deal with the pandemic.
According to aggregated data from the Prague Convention Bureau (PCB) and the Czech Statistical Office (CSO), a total of 1,220 events took place in 2021, which is 2.9 percent less than the year before. Compared to the record year of 2019, it was even a decline of 79.5 percent. The pandemic was mainly due to the number of delegates who took part in these events. It decreased year-on-year from almost 182,000 to 146,000, which is 19.5 percent less.
Large international congresses will return to Prague. However, some of them will be in a hybrid format, predicts PCB chief Roman Muška
The situation is similar in the regions – CZSO statistics show that the number of events held outside Prague fell by 13.4 percent, while the number of participants fell by about a tenth. In terms of numbers, the capital is doing better, but there are fewer delegates attending events there, which it does not want across borders due to similar restrictions on travel and mass events. Roman Muška, director of the Prague Convention Bureau, the organization that officially sponsors the Prague congress industry, says that this has led to the transfer of events to a virtual or hybrid format.
Will they do what they promised?
The Czech Republic is not published, because the pandemic has de facto angered everyone, and this has naturally been reflected in the ranking of the most popular congress destinations announced by the International Congress Association ICCA. To help companies and potential visitors or presenters at conferences, it created a new Destination Performance Index this year. It is a dataset, on the basis of which ICCA in the international context of individual cities with regard to the number of known, implemented, virtual and hybrid association events. However, the new criterion of readiness to convert a physical action into an online form has been added. Furthermore, ICCA began to monitor the ability of the organizers to actually bring the planned event to implementation. This often means moving to the virtual world if the congress is to be canceled.
Prague performed best in the category of association events, where it defended its fifth place. According to the earlier criteria of the ranking, the Czech capital would therefore be ranked in the TOP 5 congress destinations in the world. However, the capital also manages virtualization, in which it finished sixth. In the overall evaluation, the domestic metropolis occupied the seventh position.
“Congress Prague and individual service providers were immediately very flexible in the initial pandemics and quickly adapted to a wide range of services enabling online involvement of delegates and live broadcasts of events from the virtual studio environment,” says Muška. The Prague Convention Bureau subsequently even co-founded the Hybrid City Alliance, which is a grouping of destinations from different parts of the planet. These are intended to support each other in organizing hybrid events and to help organizers digitize.
I’ll meet you in the meta version
It was the virtual association events that skyrocketed in popularity last year – their number grew again positively by 11 and 18 percent, respectively, the number was reflected in the postponed or canceled events. For a change, they fell by a fifth, or tenth. Virtual events have mainly economic and ecological benefits. Although they do not have a pleasant socialization and time available for networking, flying across the oceans for one-day congresses does not pay off for companies or the planet.
For example, the Happenee platform organizes virtual events for us. “After the onset of the pandemic, we were really, like everyone else, quite afraid of what would actually happen to us,” the head of the company Zdeněk Hesoun recalled in an interview with the Euro.cz newsroom. “After thinking for a while, however, we came to the conclusion that we would enrich our event platform with new modules, thanks to which it would be possible to organize these events online. So it’s actually such a virtue out of necessity, but it worked great and made Happenee a far bigger tool than it was complex in the past, “he described how the aforementioned digitization went in practice. Companies in the Czech Republic are still in competition with Eventtee, but unlike Happenee, which focuses on commercial companies, this has clients mainly between universities.
From the world of offline conferencing to online. The domestic application for organizing Eventtee events fought and succeeded even in the time of the covid
Jindřich Trapl’s Czech-American XLAB goes one step further, transferring the conference to metaversion and is currently able to bring together speakers from all over the world into a single image and broadcast their debates from the Prague headquarters in real time. Representatives of all companies agreed that the physical events will definitely not disappear with the advent of the virtual ones – they will only be enriched by online congresses.