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The DMC Collective

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The DMC Collective

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A one-stop brand experience and destination management agency. We are The DMC Collective.

Experience Curators and (Meetings, Incentive, Conference and Exhibition) Experts. From destination consultancy to free venue finding and more, we are a local agency in the beautiful destinations of Germany, Indonesia, Singapore, and the USA.

16/10/2026

AI was the pitch this week. The data pointed somewhere else.

IMEX America closed in Las Vegas on Thursday — its 15th edition, and its largest yet: over 17,800 participants and 96,000 meetings scheduled across three days.
IMEX’s own research, citing the Events Industry Council, found that 70% of planners say face-to-face relationship-building is the hardest outcome to replicate digitally. A separate, unconnected study — the 2026 EMEA

Engagement Survey — asked a different group of 272 professionals the same question and got the same answer: human connection, now their #1 priority, up six points on last year.

IMEX CEO Carina Bauer caught the mood at Thursday’s closing press conference: “despite some uncertainty in the wider world, there’s been a spirit of optimism across the show floor.”

👉 Swipe through for the five themes that shaped the week.

15/10/2026

IMEX America closes today, and the thing worth taking from it isn't a new tool. It's an old problem nobody's actually solved.

IMEX's own research, citing the Events Industry Council, found that 70% of planners say face-to-face relationship-building is the hardest outcome to replicate digitally. A separate, unconnected study — the 2026 EMEA Engagement Survey, run in January and February among a different set of 272 business events professionals — asked what their top priority was and landed on the same answer: human connection, chosen by 39%, up six points on the year before. Two surveys with nothing to do with each other arriving at the same conclusion is a stronger signal than either one on its own.

It's also the thread running under everything we've covered this week. Amex's own forecast showed cost dropping down planners' list of worries, not because it's been solved, but because the industry has learned to manage it rather than fix it. Freeman's Ken Holsinger told the floor that true personalisation at scale is finally technically possible, but most event content isn't built for it yet. Elevoque's Michelle Orlando warned that getting the technology wrong turns a team into a help desk instead of a host. None of that was really about cost, or AI, or award-winning venues — it was all downstream of the same question: does this make the time people spend together better, or does it just make the logistics cheaper?

IMEX CEO Carina Bauer put the business case for the show plainly this year: organisations are committing earlier and investing more, because face-to-face interaction still offers a real competitive edge. The education programme backed that up before a single session ran — of the five new tracks built around this year's "Design Matters" theme, the one that filled up fastest, at IMEX Frankfurt earlier this year, wasn't about AI or sourcing. It was called Designing for Human Needs.

The show can close today with new tools announced and new venues pitched. The more useful scorecard is simpler: did any of it make the room better, or just the spreadsheet.

14/10/2026

At MEETEX, the Croatian tourist board's own trade show in Zagreb this spring, one buyer — Steve Huxham of the Silver Marketing Association — was blunt about it: "I am not very familiar with Croatia." What he was shown next wasn't Dubrovnik. It was Zagorje and Međimurje, inland regions that don't typically come up when people picture Croatia at all.

That's the more interesting story in Croatia's MICE market right now, and it isn't really about beaches or awards. The country's own trade press and tourism bodies are quietly steering buyers toward places beyond the two names everyone already associates with Croatia — largely because Dubrovnik's logistics get genuinely difficult in peak season, and planners sourcing smaller, higher-value incentive groups want exclusivity and buyout options an overcrowded old town can't easily give them.

Hyatt backed the same read with real money. Its first hotel in Croatia didn't go to Dubrovnik or Split — it opened in Zadar: a €55 million build, 133 rooms, and 740 square metres of event space including a 400 square metre ballroom. Hyatt's own General Manager for North EAME called the Balkans "a priority growth area," and Zadar is where they chose to prove it.

For anyone sourcing a 2027 programme, that's worth knowing before the shortlist defaults to the obvious three cities. The coastline everyone already pictures is genuinely crowded at peak season. The regions Croatia's own trade is now quietly pointing buyers toward — Zadar, Istria, the inland w**e country — mostly aren't.

We work across Croatia's full range, coastal and inland, alongside Germany, Italy, Singapore, Indonesia and Norway.

14/10/2026

Planners aren't managing costs better this year. They've just stopped being surprised by them.

Amex GBT's new 2027 Global Meetings & Events Forecast came out today, and the two headline numbers are the ones everyone will repeat this week: 93% of planners optimistic, 91% expecting spend to rise. Both true. Neither tells you much on its own.

The more honest version of that story came from Amex's own side, at IMEX America's opening day today. Paul McDonnough described the real challenge as balancing the creation and delivery of great experiences against costs that are still climbing, and pointed to a "strategic meetings management framework" as the way through — which sounds less like cost getting solved and more like cost getting repackaged as something to manage. It tracks with the airline capacity data we looked at last week: Europe–Middle East routes still running 12.6% below last year, fares swinging from an 18% premium to 50% and back again within months. The environment hasn't settled; the industry has just got used to it.

There was a sharper admission on AI at the same event. Freeman's Ken Holsinger said: "We're finally on the cusp of true personalization at scale but the problem is your event content isn't AI-ready." That's the real gap behind this year's AI numbers — not whether planners want personalisation, but whether anything behind the scenes is built for it yet.

The appetite to design for people, not just efficiency, is genuine — Voxo AI's Cecilia Lavin put it well on stage today: "Focus on what's happening in the room, the emotions you feel, the experiences you're having." Whether the tools being built actually deliver that, or just turn teams into help desks instead of hosts — as Elevoque's Michelle Orlando warned on a panel today — is still the open question.

13/10/2026

Walk the IMEX America show floor this week and you'll see dozens of destinations and DMCs pitching themselves as the next big thing for corporate incentive travel. Several are from source markets that weren't competing this hard even a year or two ago.

Which is exactly why it's worth being precise about what venue sourcing should actually deliver. "We'll find you a venue" undersells the job. A proper destination and venue consultancy means someone who has physically walked the space, knows which suppliers are reliable under pressure and which aren't, and can negotiate on rate because they're bringing repeat business, not a single booking.

We run this process across Germany, Italy, Croatia, Singapore, Indonesia, Norway and a growing list of destinations — so by the time a shortlist reaches you, it's already been filtered by people who've seen it in person.

If you're comparing venue-sourcing partners or corporate incentive travel companies this week, happy to walk you through how we work.

👉 https://thedmccollective.com/destinations/

13/10/2026

This week's big idea at IMEX is simple: design for humans, not attention. Today's biggest product news is that idea turned into hardware.

Wordly just launched hardware-free live captioning and translation for conferences — no headsets, nothing standing between the room and the people in it.
That gives us a test worth carrying into every other pitch you hear this week: does it ask for your attention, or does it give some back?

New research from EventsAir shows why that question matters. 72% of event professionals say they value AI — a quarter still aren't using it. Maybe because most of what's been built so far asks for more attention, not less.
We've written about what that gap means for turning trade-show conversations into real leads.

https://thedmccollective.com/how-ai-turns-trade-show-leads-into-prospects/

12/10/2026

Most events treat accessibility like a checkbox. Today's Smart Monday session didn't get that memo.

"Neurodivergent-Inclusive Events on Any Budget," led by a psychologist from the Australian Psychological Society, gets specific: quiet space, predictable agendas, managing sensory load. That's an actual how-to, not an accessibility statement tucked into a footer.

Quick honesty check: this lands in the same year half of event planners started using AI in their work for the first time, per Amex GBT's 2026 forecast. We're not going to stitch those two stats into a tidy story — different surveys, different sources. What we will say: "creating more engaging experiences" has stayed the industry's #1 priority two years running, AI or not.

And this isn't just a planner conversation — marketers, this one's for you too. A session that actually works for every attendee is what shows up afterward in your NPS scores, the stories people tell, and the content you get to build a campaign around.

Steal this for your next event brief: don't ask a DMC "do you do accessibility" — ask how they'd design one specific session for a neurodivergent attendee. We wrote up the other four questions worth asking.

Genuinely curious: what's one task you've handed to AI this year that gave you time back for something more human? We'll go first in the comments.

https://thedmccollective.com/corporate-retreats-in-europe-design/

09/10/2026

Friday afternoon daydream, anyone? 🌴

Pick one — no wrong answers:
🏰 Storm the battlements at an 11th-century castle on Lake Maggiore
🎬 Check into a restored 1914 cinema-turned-hotel in San Sebastián
🏖️ Watch the sunset over the dunes on Sylt
🛶 Wander the candy-coloured canals of Burano, just a boat ride from Venice

Three of these we've featured on the page this week — the fourth (hello, Burano) was just too pretty to leave out. Tell us your pick in the comments, and have a great weekend, wherever you end up. 🥂

09/10/2026

We don't book your flights — that's not what a DMC does. But airline competition on a route? That's something we think about every time we help shortlist a destination.

This year's airfare data shows why it matters: the premium on direct West-bound flights swung from a normal 18% to 50% in April and back again, all within a few months — driven by fewer airlines competing on these routes after the Middle East conflict began in February. We saw it play out in real time, too: Lufthansa moved quickly to add capacity on routes like Munich–Singapore once Gulf hubs got disrupted, while other carriers leaned on hubs like Istanbul and Helsinki instead.

New capacity data shows the recovery is patchy heading into 2027: Middle East capacity overall is nearly back to 2025 levels, but Europe–Middle East routes are still down 12.6%, the steepest gap of any major flow, according to aviation analysts IBA.

If you're building your 2027 events calendar now, it's worth asking how many airlines actually compete on a route, not just who flies it. Happy to talk it through if you're shortlisting destinations for next year.

07/10/2026

6 days to go until IMEX America opens its doors in Las Vegas — and the build-up is worth paying attention to.

Buyer registrations are already running ahead of last year's numbers. Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott have all confirmed attendance, several planning to launch new properties on the show floor. New destinations — Montreal, Texas, Los Cabos, Egypt and Barbados among them — are expanding their presence too.

The Events Industry Council has a simple explanation: 70% of planners say face-to-face relationship-building is the hardest outcome to replicate digitally. Turns out the room still matters.

Anyone else counting down? 👋

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