Luring international delegates to your country is a serious global business, and the competition is fierce.
More than 95,000 delegates descend on Scotland each year, attending association meetings, conferences, seminars or conventions.
In the main they will be looking for academic or professional insights, practical training, networking opportunities and mutual support from others in their field.
They will also find the best of Scotland. And they spend a lot of money: an international delegate spends about £450 per day.
The Scottish Association Survey records that 282 association events were held in Scotland 2022/23 bringing in 95,000 delegates for a total of 295,000 “delegate days”. The net additional value of these association events was estimated to be approximately £175m.
Competition to win these meetings is fierce. Our Scottish cities are up against each other and locations across the world but they do rate well. International Congress and Convention Association data for 2023 ranks Glasgow and Edinburgh as the UK’s second and third most popular event destinations, with London in the top spot.
To win this business, convention bureaux promote the cities – sometimes working on events a decade in advance.
“The role of Glasgow Convention Bureau is to drive economic benefit to the city through delegate spend,” explains Aileen Crawford, the bureau’s head.
“We also are here to position Glasgow on the global stage as a world-leading conference destination through our links to academia. So our main focus and target is academic, educational association meetings.”
She adds that the bureau team, supported by the city, offers a free, impartial, one-stop shop for any meeting planner, conference organiser or a local academic who wants to attract their peers – their association meetings – to the city.
The bureaux in Aberdeen and Edinburgh operate on a similar basis, but each promote their own strengths. In Aberdeen, traditionally the home of oil and gas conferences, the emphasis has pivoted to renewable energy, as the Floating Offshore Wind Conference at P&J Live in October illustrates.
“We are trying to adapt people’s perception of the city to the new, modern way of Aberdeen,” says Laura Wilson, head of the Aberdeen Convention Bureau.
“When it comes to association events, for example, we’re really strong in life sciences. But people may not be not aware that tech is an emerging market within Aberdeenshire, as well as obviously agriculture and food produce.
“On top of that, the infrastructure has hugely changed.”
The Event Complex Aberdeen (TECA), which opened in 2019, with the £333m purpose-built P&J Live and two on-site hotels, has been a game changer. There’s a 48,000sqm flexible event space, conference capacity of 5,000 and the arena takes an audience of up to 15,000 people.
Wilson adds: “It has absolutely everything on site that you need: an AV team, an exhibitions team, caterers, everything that you can think of is there and it’s part of the package. It’s also the most sustainable conference centre in the UK, being powered by hydrogen from the city’s waste and an anaerobic digestion system.”
Aileen Crawford: “We are here to position Glasgow as a world-leading conference destination”
The facilities are not limited to TECA. “There’s 7,000 hotel rooms throughout the whole region,” says Wilson.
“We have a range of accommodation to suit different budgets and that’s something that’s really attractive to event organisers. So we have something for everybody.”
The VisitAberdeenshire 2023 annual review reported the Aberdeen Convention Bureau secured 10 conferences for future years, at a value of almost £12m, with more than 12,000 delegates and 43,655 bed nights in the region.
In Edinburgh, the convention sector is unsurprisingly larger. From May 2022 to April 2024, Convention Edinburgh received 411 inquiries (an estimated £245m economic potential), confirming 60 events which will attract more than 21,450 delegates to the city, equating to 101,000 bednights and £47m of economic impact.
Since those figures were published, Convention Edinburgh has returned to City of Edinburgh Council management after being under the guardianship of the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC).
In total, the city offers approximately 15,000 hotel rooms, with additional projects underway. The knowledge landscape is also evolving, with developments such as the Edinburgh Futures Institute – a state-of-the-art hub for future-focused learning, research, and innovation – enhancing its reputation.
Glasgow, which has 40 conferences with more than 1,000 delegates confirmed up to 2030, also plays to its strengths and particularly its links to universities, the NHS and research hospitals.
“Glasgow has the largest academic community outside London, and is very much seen as a hub of leading research in fields of life sciences and medicine,” says Crawford, whose team supports 400 to 500 business events a year.
The conference for the European SocieTy for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) in May was a case in point, with more than 6,000 delegates arriving for the event at the Scottish Events Campus.
“It is a prestigious medical conference that meets in major European cities annually, and because of the world-leading academic research in radiotherapy at the University of Glasgow, ESTRO was encouraged to host their meeting here.”
Laura Wilson: “We are trying to adapt perceptions of the city to the new, modern way of Aberdeen
It is not only medicine and life sciences but also engineering, low carbon and energy expertise that lure events to the city. Crawford adds: “Glasgow really leads the way when it comes to small satellites, the space sector in Scotland is growing dramatically, and Glasgow is very much the hub of that. Glasgow launches more small satellites than anywhere else in Europe.
“All these clusters of excellence, these research hubs based within our universities, will have world leading or national leading lights, and they are the ones that the convention bureau supports to bid to host their future association meeting.”
Those local academics can be the key to success in landing a conference. And the majority of convention bureaux run ambassador programmes.
For Aberdeen, its Ambassador Network is a critical element of its work. “It is key to us because there’s such a wealth of ambassadors who work within the key sectors,” says Wilson.
“We really need that academic – who is a member of the association, who knows all the right contacts – to go in and wave the Aberdeen flag for us. So we do work really closely with them to attract conferences.”
The capital’s Edinburgh Ambassador Programme members – academic and business professionals – are drawn from fields as varied as science and technology, sport and leisure, medicine and law.
In the programme’s first 20 years its members generated £900m for the local economy, bringing 528,605 delegates to 1,348 events, and showcasing the capital’s knowledge economy.
Crawford can also put a figure on how often Glasgow’s ambassadors make the difference.
“When we look at the figures of the conferences that come to the city, over 60 per cent of the Glasgow conferences that we support have a local academic either linked to or leading the conference.”
