ABSTRACT
American Presidents hosting the latest Middle East Summit at Camp David in Maryland, the Royal College of Nursing holding its annual conference in Bournemouth, members of the International Congress and Convention Association gathering for their assembly and congress in Montevideo, shareholders of Microsoft or HSBC attending the company’s annual general meeting, the sales force of GlaxoSmithKline coming together for a regular briefing or training event, or their high achievers jetting off for an incentive-cum-meeting trip to an exotic overseas destination. The different events described above have one thing in com-
mon: they are all to dowith bringing people together, face-to-face, to exchange ideas and information, to discuss and in some cases negotiate, to build friendships and closer business relationships, to encourage better performance by individuals and organizations. They are different facets of the same dynamic, international, economically vibrant conference industry. The terms used (‘summit’, ‘meeting’, ‘conference’, ‘assembly’, ‘convention’, ‘congress’, ‘AGM’, ‘briefing’, ‘training’, ‘incentive’) may vary, and the events themselves may have different formats and emphases, but the essential ingredients and objectives are the same. Conferences are at the forefront of modern communications,
whether this is for internal communications (sales meetings, training seminars, board retreats, major annual conferences, for example) or as a vehicle for communicating with key audiences (such as press briefings, product launches, annual general meetings, some technical conferences). Conferences is a generic term to describe a diverse mix of communications events. The phrase ‘conference industry’ is of very recent origin, and
is certainly not one that would have been heard until the second half of the twentieth century. Yet people’s need to congregate
and confer is one of the things that defines our humanity and, for a multitude of different reasons, meetings and gatherings of people have taken place since the early days of civilization. Shone (1998) traces the evolution of meetings since Roman times in Britain and Ireland, and the development of meeting rooms and meeting places to accommodate these, driven largely by the needs of trade and commerce. One of the highest profile events in the past couple of hun-
dred years, perhaps almost a launch event for our contemporary conference industry, was the Congress of Vienna held from September 1814 to June 1815. The Congress was called to reestablish the territorial divisions of Europe at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and representatives included all of the major world powers of the day (with the exception of Turkey). It is tempting to imagine what the ‘delegate spend’ must have been like, with delegates such as Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, Prince Karl August von Hardenberg from Prussia, and Viscount Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington as the principal British representatives. Each representative would have been accompanied by a substantial delegation of support staff and partners, requiring accommodation, social programmes, lavish corporate entertainment, ground handling, not to mention state-of-the-art conference facilities. The Vienna Convention Bureau no doubt celebrated long and hard its success in attracting such a highprofile, high-spend event to the city! As the nineteenth century progressed, universities increasingly
provided facilities for the dissemination of information within academic circles, while the boom in spa towns and, in the UK, Victorian resorts with assembly rooms began to make available larger public spaces for entertainment and meetings. At the same time, the development of the railway network was accompanied by the construction of railway hotels alongside major stations. Many of these hotels had substantial function rooms available for hire. Shone contends that the dawn of the twentieth century was
accompanied by a change in the demand for meetings:
Though assemblies and congresses continued to be driven by trade and industry, there was a slow and gradual increase in activity which, rather than promoting products, or reporting a company’s annual progress, looked to developing staff and sales. The precursors of the sales training meeting, the ‘congress of commercials’ (or commercial travellers) of the 1920s and 1930s, began to develop into something more modern and recognizable.
