Summary of the main results
The tenth edition of the survey by the Italian Observatory of Congresses and Events was attended by 631 venues, with a redemption percentage compared to the 5,644 venues in the universe of 11.2% overall .
On the basis of the answers provided by the venues that joined the survey and thanks to the monitoring conducted by ASERI, it was possible to estimate that 20% of the Italian venues, although open, did not host any event. In particular, the percentage of venues with at least one event (Table 3) is higher in the North (82, 3% of the total offices in the area) and in the South (80%) and lower in the Centre (74.9%) and in the Islands (79.7%).
With respect to the type of venue (Table 4), conference centres hosted at least one event in the highest percentage (in 97.5% of cases), while hotels with meeting rooms were active in 77.9% of cases and historic houses only in 73.4% of cases.
The research showed that in 2023, a total of 340,057 events were held in Italy (fig. 1) with a minimum of 10 participants each and a minimum duration of 4 hours (+12% compared to 2022 and -21.1% compared to 2019) (graph 1), for a total of 27,152,890 participants (+28% compared to 2022 and -6.7% compared to 2019) – an average of 79.8 people per event – and 41,835,932 attendances (+31.9% compared to 2019 ) to 2022 and -3.6% compared to 2019). The average duration of the events was 1.43 days, with no significant differences compared to previous years.
Events lasting more than one day accounted for 25.7% of the total and reached over 12 million participants and about 30,714,000 presences in the area (+50.6% compared to 2022 and +5.8% compared to 2019) which, based on data collected by ISTAT, can be estimated to have represented 11.2% of the presences found at the total number of hotels in 2023.
The data collected confirm that in 2023 the Italian meeting industry recorded a solid recovery especially in terms of attendance generated in the area, which increased overall by +31.9% compared to 2022 and which have now exceeded the pre-pandemic level with reference to all the different types of venues, with the sole exception of hotels with meeting rooms and conference centers with a maximum total capacity of less than 500 seats.
In any case, the awareness that not all venues for congresses and events would resume full activity after the pandemic crisis had already been found during the survey of the Italian Observatory of Congresses and Events conducted during the first quarter of 2022: in that period, in fact, compared to 39.9% of venues that assumed they could return to pre-pandemic levels of activity as early as 2022 and 37.2% who predicted that this would be could occur during 2023, as many as 22.9% of respondents were unable to make forecasts of a return to 2019 levels before 2024.
After all, even at the European level, the meeting industry is experiencing progressive but slow growth that will lead to reaching or exceeding pre-pandemic levels presumably during 2024, due to geopolitical crises at the international level that have generated instability and uncertainty, leading to negative effects for the world economy from which the meeting industry is also affected, which by its nature shows trends correlated with the vitality and prospects of companies and scientific, technological and cultural associations in the broadest sense.
However, it should be noted that the direct comparison of the annual data with the pre-pandemic situation allows us to formulate considerations and evaluations only as a first approximation, as in order to fully understand the real development dynamics that characterize the meeting industry, it is necessary to take into account the profound transformations that have taken place since 2020 and which have involved both the demand side for meetings on the part of companies and associations and the supply side of facilities to accommodate them.