Press Cuttings Transcripts
Why London comes last
Meetings and Incentive Travel,
May 2004
If the organisers had wanted to bring in a couple of big hitters to show just how badly London is doing in the international convention market, they couldn’t have done a better job. They brought in Toyota Europe’s general manager marketing operations Jozef Vandecruys who laid it out very clearly – the city in front is not London. (He didn’t say that, but that’s the shorthand version).
But he did say he doesn’t bring his big 6000-delegate events and he won’t in the foreseeable future because the capital doesn’t have the facilities, it’s too expensive, transportation is “a nightmare”, you can’t get large hotel allocations and there is a shortage of large function facilities.
Vandercruys also criticised London hotel rates: “We can get a five-star hotel for around £170 in many destinations but I would have to pay £250 in London for a similar room.
“Apart from that, it’s a great city,” he said without a hint of irony. “I love London,” he added reassuringly. He might love our capital but he won’t be bringing us any major meetings. Above all, he told delegates, London needs a world class, large-scale convention centre. He told delegates that Barcelona would stage his 2005 event and London did not even make the short list. He said London “offered poor value for money”. He said other cities are better prepared and present a more united product.
“To Barcelona, the entire business community welcomes the event to the city. We are given police escorts, special travel permits and clearance at the airports. We also need special slots for our charter aircraft – I don’t think Heathrow would ever be able to cope with our events.”
He left London with chilling advice: “Tomorrow belongs to those who prepare today.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, up stepped Kathy McGee, executive secretary of The European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery and president of The Associations Conference Forum. This is a collection of 16 mostly medical international associations who gather regularly to discuss the issues surrounding their conferences. But if the audience expected softer handling from a lady, what they got was an iron fist in a velvet glove. Cool and precise in her delivery, Ms McGee unveiled a series of slides that bore testimony to London’s irrelevance to the world’s big conference organisers. Her presentation didn’t just rule out London for her group of associations, she said that the city “comes last on each of the key criteria for venue selection” for her event.
Her congress requires an auditorium for 3,500 people and a variety of 21 smaller rooms for up to 270. She also needs 7,500 square mtres of exhibition space in the same building. The Barbican’s exhibition space, she said referring pointedly to its low ceilings “is only for small people”.
She told the audience London needs to offer the kinds of incentives offered by major competitos such as mayoral banquets and receptions. She didn’t mention cash subventions – but the audience did. Asked by moderator john Pienaar how far London is from being a true contender in the international congress championships, Ms McGee said: “A long way off”.
She cited Vienna as a superb city “with an outstanding convention bureau” and said it handled more than 20 per cent of the 110 cogresses organised or contracted by the members of The Associations Conference Forum in the past five years. Barcelona had won around 10% of these and, most offensive of all to Londoners, Glasgow was also hailed a strong venue with the backing of a “tremendous convention bureau that brings together the whole city to host our events.” Glasgow attracts around 5 per cent of her group’s congresses.
This negative kick-off with two major organisers explaining why London doesn’t cut the mustard was geared to shake delegates out of their mid-morning complacendy and it worked.
It didn’t quite have the optimism or the energy of the 2003 event, and some of the proposals repeated last year’s deliberations, but the second London Leadership Forum on Business Tourism still pulled in the great and the good, raised the big questions, suggested a few good answers and kept the big issues on the agenda. It also gave progress reports on the recommendations tabled a year before, including, for example, the formation of the Business Tourism Advisory Group (BTAG) chaired by Vanessa Cotton, which meets quarterly and the setting up of the Mayoral Commission on the International Convention Centre.
Will The Leadership Forum lead to the big soltuions? Not overnight or, even, in 12 months, not when it has taken 30-some years to create the problems. But even the staging and funding of such events demonstrates the London Development Agency (LDA) is serious about investigating and rectifying London’s business tourism problems. And it does provide an ear for the industry as well as the political will and the funding to effect some of the recommendations. It gets my vote as the best things to happen in London for a long time.
Setting the scene for delegates, LDA’s Tim Addison told delegates: “We listened to your recommendations a year ago and we took immediate action. Delivering new business to London has to be a priority.”
Vanessa Cotton said: “A year ago we focused on what we needed from the public sector and they have listened.” She explained how funding for the city had been increased since then. “This time we need to tell them how we want the money spent. It’s now vital that we have a clear and united voice. We are losing business to competitors because we don’t have a single voice. By working together we can attract a lot more business – with or without a new convention centre.”
In fact there was so much talk about a new convention centre that very little discussion was dedicated to how the increased funding should be spent.
The newly restructured ‘convention bureau’ within the restructured tourism board called Visit London came in for criticism before commercial director David Hornby stepped in to remind the audience that far from service levels being reduced, the convention bureau has been absorbed into the main tourist board but its funding and resources have been hugely increased. He said: “Funding from the LDA has gone up this year from £800,000 to £1.2 million. The service provision has been increased and so has the number of staff.”
But both Hornby and the LDA’s Tim Addison accepted that the communication of this message may not have reached all parts of the industry yet. Hornby has spent almost a year looking at all the best practises in visits to many of the top convention bureaux around the world and is ready to implement the best of these at Visit London.
The Leadership Forum began in plenary session and then broke into groups to examine the problems and suggest solutions for Visit London and the LDA. In attendance were event organisers of every description, venues and hotels – in short, all the stakeholders. The ideas were fed back in writing from table leaders. They included:
• Lobbying for a reduction on VAT for accommodation
• The creation of a cross-sector working party including planning, police, immigration, transportation etc to work with tourism interests.
• A cash subvention policy to provide incentives to international congress organisers.
• The building of a world class convention centre
The latter, of course, dominates the landscape and dominated the discussion. All the stakeholders - with the possible exeption of competitors for big events such as ExCeL - see the benefit of the arrival of such a venue. All agreed that for small to medium-sized meetings London still offers an excellent range of facilities. All agreed that prices are too high (except perhaps the hoteliers who are under pressure to deliver high rate yields and point to that old, simplistic “the market will decide the price” routine). But he jury is still out on the issue of a new convention centre.
The chairman of the Internation Convention Centre mayoral commission Gerry Acher didn’t attend the cvent but was interviewed by John Pienaar and this was shown on video. Pienaar asked all the right questions but Acher tiptoed around them and gave no clue a to the odds on the capital getting such a building. Acher claims to be “agnostic” on the subject but sounded rather negative. “We have to make it make business sense,” he said with due gravitas, “and we won’t get much change out of £150 million for such a building.”
Will London get a new convention centre? Who knows? One thing’s for sure, if they key criterion to justify the investment in all the world’s convention centres had always been the profitability of the buildings, none would ever have been built. But at least now we are having the debate – and we have the London Leadership Forum to thank for that.