The Macau authorities aim to boost the city’s tally of meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (MICE) events by 50 percent year-on-year in 2024. They anticipate “1,500” such gatherings, compared to an expected 1,000 this year.
The 2024 target is set with help from a government-led working group including local events-trade associations and the community’s six casino operators. That is according to the city’s inward-investment agency, Macao Trade and Investment Promotion Institute (IPIM), in a Wednesday press release.
In July the agency had established a working group with representatives from the Macau casino operators, as well as five local trade associations covering the MICE sector, with the aim of drawing more “international- and regional” -level events to the city.
The aim is to “draw good-quality conferences and exhibitions” to Macau, stated the Wednesday update.
In 2019 – the trading year prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic – Macau hosted 1,536 MICE events, with over 2 million “participants and attendees”, according to data from the city’s Statistics and Census Service.
In the Wednesday release, the trade promotion institute reiterated a forecast that Macau would host in aggregate more than 1,000 MICE events in 2023. During the first six months of this year, the city had 490 MICE events, said to have drawn more than “700,000” participants, the release stated.
