Since the dawn of meetings, different regions around the globe and even individual countries have used their own lingo to define the various types of formal gatherings of professionals. The language confusion pervades to this day, but late last year, the International Organization for Standardization, better known as ISO, unveiled a standard designed to create a uniform vocabulary for the worldwide meetings industry.
ISO 25639-1, listing 58 terms and definitions agreed upon by 17 countries, is one half of what's touted as the first international standard for "exhibitions, shows, fairs, and conventions." The other half, ISO 25639-2, standardizes measurement procedures in hopes of unifying record-keeping and bringing global consistency and transparency to meetings statistics.
The U.S. is participating in the standard, along with the U.K., France, Germany, and other major countries. Singapore is the secretariat of the standard, because ISO 25639 is based on that nation's standard for exhibition terminology and audit procedures.
Conceivably in the future, hospitality suppliers and convention organizers could market themselves as ISO 25639-certified as a competitive advantage, auditors will be able to gauge compliance, and numbers between competitors could be objectively compared.
For example, when exhibition organizers market their shows, it is usually not clear whether cited dimensions refer to wall-to-wall space or the exhibition area occupied by exhibitors. ISO 25639-1 addresses ambiguity by defining exhibition space as either "gross exhibition space" (wall-to-wall space) or "net exhibition space" (which excludes "non-content" areas like corridors and gantries).
ISO 25639-2 then provides the procedures to measure gross space and net space in a consistent and accurate way.
Stephen Tan, chief executive of trade show organizer Singapore Exhibition Services Pte. Ltd., led the ISO committee that created the standard and will chair it through 2010."International consensus on the terminologies will provide common reference that enables transparency in an increasingly global arena," he said. "Exhibition organizers, contractors, and venue operators will be able to communicate consistently to all companies. This will facilitate the evaluation of statistical information."
ISO 25639-2 is not the lone attempt to bring uniformity to the way meetings are measured around the world and to lend professionalism and credibility to the industry.
Last year, a pilot program to establish a standard methodology to calculate the economic impact of meetings gained steam, and its latest results will be presented at the United Nations World Tourism Organization's 5th International Conference on Tourism Statistics, March 30 to April 2, in Bali, Indonesia.
Steered by the UNWTO, along with Meeting Professionals International, the International Congress and Convention Association, and Reed Travel Exhibitions, seven nations—Australia, Austria, Canada, Finland, Mexico, South Africa, and Spain—have been extracting meetings data from their UN tourism satellite accounts (TSA) to confirm the extent meetings have on their national economies (Jan. 28, 2008 MN, p. 16).
While tourism is already recognized as a major global economic driver, the goals of the pilot effort, known as the TSA Extension, are to get the UN to recognize meetings as a significant subset of tourism and to establish a formal framework for quantifying their economic importance.
According to Didier Scaillet, MPI's VP of global development, the initiative thus far has produced "robust" methodology and resulted in MPI Foundation Canada's "Canadian Economic Impact Study (CEIS),"which will be spotlighted at UNWTO's Bali conference. (CEIS was also presented at ICCA's 47th annual conference in Victoria, BC, in November.)
The CEIS is "the first concrete application" of the meetings extension to the international satellite accounting system, said Scaillet. "We are still in contact with various pilot countries and have received great interest from others (including the U.S., Denmark, and Switzerland) to conduct similar studies," he told MeetingNews.
A closer look at the methodology—including the project's definition of a meeting—is offered in the CEIS presentation prepared by MPI, ICCA, Reed, and Maritz Research. A PDF file is downloadable from the Internet using the search phrase "Canadian economic impact study."
Originally published Feb. 2, 2009