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Event management blog: all about international Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions. Here you can find information about MICE destinations, venues, gastronomy, entertainment and more
Contact: events[at]themiceblog[dot]com

25/05/2026

I walked the IMEX show floor with a creative director. Now I can’t unsee it.

The Wonder Walk with is basically a live trend report for trade fairs. One walk and your eye recalibrates.

The big idea is simple: good design makes a space work for the people in it. Get the human-centric basics right. Then add your one thing for identity.

Frankfurt’s Inspiration Hub proves it. Three learning spaces in Hall 9, each rooted in the region:

→ Flow — the River Main. Movement and connection.
→ Rise — the Taunus Mountains. Collective strength and uplift.
→ Evolve — the city forest. Interdependence and diversity.

Identity comes from place. Not from a bigger budget.

Three principles kept showing up on the tour:

1. Less is more. Calmer colour tones. Considered layouts. Space to breathe.

2. Local is global. The strongest stands had one clear idea, rooted in place.

3. Love your tones. Cooler floors, softer storytelling, material and colour working together.

Here’s what surprised me.

The stands that stood out weren’t the biggest or the brightest. They were the ones that chose what to leave out.

When you simplify, contrast does the heavy lifting. Less imagery, but more memorable. Fewer colours, but sharper ones.

Less, but sharper.

As Robert put it: „Design matters because almost everything around us — except nature — was a choice. So make better choices.“

So here’s the question for your next event:
What’s the one thing your stand should say?

22/05/2026

Trust, attention, connection. Three things every brand is fighting for, and events deliver all three at once.

I attended and Encore’s presentation of their research findings from The Experience Design Report at IMEX, and I left convinced our industry is sitting on a massive opportunity.

Here’s what stood out for me:

-> Events are becoming the antidote to AI.

The more content gets faked, the more a real room is worth.

The trust signal is genuine connection and shared experiences.

-> Content and connection feed each other, so make them work together.

A one-way keynote does not create connection on its own. But content that gets people to stay, talk, and share what they learned does. Build both.

-> Unscripted moments win.

Audiences light up for what feels real. That is why panels, the format everyone underrates, are one of the most-liked formats in the data, and the most popular for events of 10,000+ people. Julius calls them the new town hall. Real voices, real perspectives, real people they know.

There has rarely been a better time to design events well. Go build something people cannot get anywhere else.

What are you most excited to try this year?

21/05/2026

Fresh from the closing press conference. A few things you’ll want to know.

IMEX has now confirmed its dates all the way through to 2030, for both Frankfurt and America.

The one worth extra attention, IMEX Frankfurt steps outside its usual May slot twice:

-> In 2028 it moves earlier, to late April. In 2030 it shifts to early June.

If you plan years ahead, those two are worth pencilling in now.

The 2026 edition broke records.

Over 3,700 hosted buyers from around 60 markets. 73,000 meetings pre-scheduled before the doors opened, 63,000 of them one to ones, up 8% on last year.

Buyers averaged nearly 17 meetings each.

The map is shifting too.

-> Latin America grew around 15%, Africa 8%, with Angola, Mauritius and Mozambique exhibiting for the first time.

-> Hong Kong, Tunisia and Puerto Rico came back after a few years away.

Two exciting announcement:

IMEX set a sustainability target, 20% lower carbon emissions by 2030, and named travel as the hardest part to solve. Their answer includes encouraging more attendees to arrive by train.

As someone who’s done that for years, I’m glad to see it on the agenda.

And the Future Leaders Forum is being rebuilt as a template IMEX will hand to the industry, so any organisation can run its own version.

The talent gap is real, and this is a practical way to widen the door.

My own first IMEX, back in 2012, was as a student at the Future Leaders Forum, it gave me an entry point into the world of MICE. That’s exactly what it can do for the next generation.

And lastly, this year’s IMEX had a new theme, Design Matters, and you could feel it in the energy of the show floor. Nothing was left to chance.

It showed in the redesigned Hall 9, and in the way the hosted buyer programme makes room for inspiration: time for education sessions, for discovery, and for the spontaneous conversations with exhibitors that so often turn into the best ones.

Thank you to , Ray Bloom and the entire team at IMEX for a phenomenal edition.

If you were at IMEX this year, I’d like to hear it, what stood out most to you?

13/05/2026

Ad | Munich trade fairs fill the city quickly.

Putting your whole team under one roof gets harder by the week.

Four Points by Sheraton Munich Arabellapark keeps that from happening. 446 rooms, one well-connected location.

The surroundings help too. Cafés and a supermarket nearby. Bar, gym, and pool in the hotel. Useful details when the days are long.

The logistics matter, but the bigger benefit is what they free up: time and focus for the work the team came to do.

How do you handle group accommodation during peak fair season? Curious to hear what works for your team.

Bookmark this one for your next Munich planning cycle.

08/05/2026

After 5 years at IMEX I stopped trying to attend everything.

200+ sessions across 3 days. You can realistically catch maybe 10–12 of them. So I built a filter.

Now I only pick sessions that do one of three things:

→ Challenge how I think
→ Give me data I can use immediately
→ Put me in a room with people who care

These 8 made the cut.

Some of them are obvious choices like Forrester’s State of Events Survey which will give you numbers to quote in client proposals for the rest of the year.

State of the Industry: Designing Our Future is the big-picture session of the show, with IMEX CEO alongside Kevin Hinton, Huey Hong Ong, H.E Juma Al Kait and Kai Hattendorf, where the conversation about where events are actually heading happens in one room.

Others are less expected. Wonder Walks with isn’t even a classroom session, you walk the show floor through a design-thinking lens. And Building the Mental Health Standard for our Industry with Ferron Gray isn’t a talk at all. It’s a working session where the standard is being drafted in the room, with event professionals shaping it before it goes global.

Then there’s Extraordinary Pillow Talk 1 with Philipp Jacobius and Claus Raasted, which asks what we’re actually designing for when the thing isn’t really the thing. And IMEX Designed for Joy: Measuring Joy, Proving It Matters with David Adler, Panos Moutafis and Frances Vieras Blanc, which makes the case for joy as an actual event metric. Frances also leads the closing Pillow Talk on measuring the ROI of what you can’t quantify.

Tuesday at 14:00 I’m hosting the EventProfs Meetup with .events at the stand (Hall 8, A455). No panels. No agenda. Great coffee ☕️ Come say hi.

Save this if you’re still planning your IMEX schedule and tell me which session you’d pick first.

07/05/2026

IMEX is in 12 days. This year I’m doing five things differently.

What’s YOUR one thing? Tell me in the comments.

05/05/2026

The best event design happens because of the destination.

When a city is used well, it becomes part of the agenda, part of the atmosphere, and part of the reason people remember the experience long after they get home.

That might mean turning the journey into the venue in Switzerland.

Making sustainability the format, not just a talking point, in Copenhagen.

Or letting Rotterdam’s architecture and energy shape the experience itself.

That is when a destination stops being a backdrop and starts becoming part of the event design.

Before your next event, it is worth asking:

1. Could this day happen in any other city?
2. Would the local CVB recognize their city in our programme?
3. Does at least one session require us to actually be there?

Those three questions can turn a well-planned event into one that feels specific, intentional, and impossible to copy and paste somewhere else.

Now I’d love to hear from you:

Which destination got it right?
Which event could only have happened there?
Tell me in the comments.

04/05/2026

A moment at Davos changed how I think about destination marketing.

One of the speakers was asked the question every panellist gets: “How do you find Davos this year?”

Her answer stopped me.

“I love Davos because on this promenade, I bump into more colleagues than I do at our headquarters back home in the US.”

Let that sink in.

As an industry, when we promote destinations, we default to the tangible stuff.

Venue capacity. Renovations. New openings. Catering. Activities.

But what mattered to her wasn’t any of that.

It was connection. To her team. To her company. To the people she rarely sees in person.

This is the game changer for convention bureaus.

Because if you understand this, your pitch shifts completely.

Instead of: “We have a congress centre.”
(So do other destinations)

You say: “We’re a compact destination where the walking distance between venues is a networking opportunity. Serendipity isn’t luck here, it’s infrastructure. Shorter transfers, more touchpoints, faster business outcomes.”

That is a completely different proposition.

Davos gets this. Yes, the WEF happens behind closed doors. But much of what makes Davos magnetic happens on the promenade, at the side events, in the ecosystem around the main programme.

So here is my bold prediction:

The destinations that will win are the ones that build for micro-moments, where attendees move through an ecosystem that creates connections by design.

To every convention bureau reading this: listen to your attendees. Pay attention to the words they use. What matters to them is probably not what you’re leading with.

The future belongs to destinations that design for connection, not just capacity.

03/05/2026

This is how I’m getting ready for 🏃🏽‍♀️

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