Most of us have probably never heard of the MICE Industry, or that it has a potential worth of billions upon billions of US dollars annually in terms of revenue for the gross national product (GNP).

MICE stands for Meetings, Incentive Travel, Conferences, and Exhibitions, but it is more commonly just simply referred to as the Meeting Industry.

According to leading market analysts, Singapore is the ‘king cheese’ of MICE and accounts for the largest number of international meetings among all cities around the globe, holding that title for at least the past five years.

In fact, according to the Union of International Associations (UIA), business meeting tourism is the leading driver of Singapore’s larger hospitality sector.  Brussels, said the UIA, is the second leading global business travel destination.

Vietnam is largely absent from the market, said leaders at the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism and in response organized a Meeting Industry forum earlier this month in Hanoi.

Speaking at the event, Gilbert Whelan, president of the Vietnam MICE Club, which was formed in 2011, acknowledged the development of the industry to date ‘stinks’ and more need be done to stimulate its growth.

Our goal is to create a platform to bring business owners, hotel operators, Airline companies, travel agents and others with a stake in the industry together to meet and exchange information, said Mr Whelan.

We have accomplished that task, but the industry’s development still has ‘holes in it’ and lags far behind other countries, despite all the potential.

If we take a look at Singapore and China, for example, the industry is busting out all over, bringing in billions of US dollars in revenue and it has actually been the impetus driving the entire tourism sector.

The prospects for the MICE industry in Vietnam are very bright, said Mr Whelan. Indeed, trends are changing and indicate that the hospitality and tourism sectors are on the verge of making a breakthrough, but we’re just not there yet.

The world economy has turned the corner and hopefully is back on the upswing.

With the economy improving, there is once again a renewed demand by businesses for exhibitions, meetings and events to showcase the latest products, he said, and now is the time for brainstorming new and innovative ideas to attract clients to the nation’s shores.

Far too many assume, said Mr Whelan, that foreign holiday travellers to see landscapes and what not are what generates big bucks for the tourism industry.

However, the reality is that a traveller who visits any country to attend a business meeting will outspend the holiday traveller by four to fivefold.

The other perplexing problem confronting us, is that we, as a nation, have come up short when it comes to making a collective and coordinated effort to attract international organizations to hold their meetings here in Vietnam.

We are passively sitting by waiting for buyers to knock on our door. There is an old saying in marketing that if a person can build a better mousetrap the world will build a pathway to that person’s door.

Well, that old saying isn’t true, said Mr Whelan— if one wants to sell a product, it has to be actively marketed.  

The government nor any private sector organization have a single office that is established and solely dedicated to actively seeking international meetings, said Mr Whelan.

We must more aggressively encourage global meetings to be held here.

The more international meetings we host, the higher our income from the services provided will be.

We have to create MICE marketing groups that can host and attend Expos and forums around the globe advocating Vietnam as a Meeting Industry destination, because such things attract buyers who hold the power to choose Vietnam.

In addition, he said, we must train people on event management at higher levels of education.

When something is based on education, we can get expertise, a highly skilled workforce, and experts who will nurture the industry to grow, creating more jobs and significant income for Vietnam.

Most importantly ‘we need to wake up and smell the cheese’ when it comes to growing the Meeting Industry.

VOV