Meeting typologies and convention site selection criteria: an empirical analysis on the Italian Meeting Industry

In the last years convention destinations, like enterprises, are to be considered as real competitive units operating in contexts that are getting more and more competitive. This is because the competitive arenas have been broaden as a consequence of the evolution of communication and transport means and of the always greater variety, changeability and complexity of the tourists’ needs and desires. In such a scenario, CVBs and DMO have more and more difficulty in attracting meeting in the destinations they manage and promote and the necessity to deepen understand the knowledge about selection site criteria emerges considerably. National and international academic literature answer to this latter necessity showing, however, an important interpretative gap. Indeed, no previous research has yet analysed the importance, and then the influence, that different attributes of a convention destination have on the site selection process according to the different type of meeting that must be organised. This paper moves on from a review of national and international literature on convention destinations and on typologies of meeting that can be organised. It aims to deepen and broaden the scientific debate on the subject, analysing for the first time – through an empirical research on the operators of the Italian meeting industry – if and how the importance that is assigned to each attribute, and then the influence they exert, change according to different type of meeting. From the empirical analysis, some important managerial implications for both public and private operators will follow: on the one hand, given the diverse attributes it would be possible to identify the meeting segments in which a destination can be better positioned; on the other hand, practitioners can choose attributes that need to be strengthened in order to reposition the destination in different meeting segments.