In early December (2-3) CMW’S Emily King spent a whirlwind 24-hours in Copenhagen on a press trip designed to give a social-media enthused experience of the Danish capital.
Copenhagen is a compact city and an ideal destination for delegates to get to see most of the sights in a short time.
Our press trip, organised by the city’s CVB, Wonderful Copenhagen, offered a chance to preview the ‘Danish Meetovation’ strategic meeting design concept, before it is implemented by Meeting Professionals International (MPI) at its European Meetings and Events Conference (EMEC) in February of this year.
In this short, yet sweet, trip we tweeted our way through a taste of the #MINDblowing conference concept.
Meetovation has been on the lips of the CVB staff for a while, but here was an experiential opportunity to see its elements and ingredients brought to life:
Active involvement
First stop after check-in was a ‘Food for Thought’ lunch welcome session at the Radisson Blu. Its ‘Brain Food’ menu is used for all conferences and meetings, including EMEC 2016.
Later we joined corporate planners, from the UK and Germany, in attending the Meetovation-style MIND ‘famtrip’ hosted by the Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers. The teams created presentations advertising Denmark, each using a different style of presenting e.g. a TV advert, or a human PowerPoint.
A quick tour of the city then followed and a tour of the sustainable Toldboden, which has a total capacity of 1,440, and is venue for the EMEC 2016 rendezvous. We headed back to the airport with aching tweet fingers.
Local involvement
Copenhagen stands out as a ‘sustainable’ city and the produce used for the ‘Brain Food’ at lunch was locally sourced and designed to keep a delegate ‘sustained’ for a day of meetings.
The evening’s ‘Sustainable Dining Experience’ was in a radical no-food-waste restaurant, which serves only food cooked from surpluses. This will also be on offer to EMEC 2016 delegates.
We sampled local transport via the Metro. With one direct line through the city, it’s hard to go wrong.
Creative setup
The venues of Copenhagen play the ‘green’ card creatively. The Crowne Plaza has created a garden lobby, with benches, a meeting area, café, and oodles of greenery with the aim of bringing the outside in. They used various plants and greenery to decorate table displays, and their showcase suite.
Responsible thinking
Meetings information was produced in digital format to reduce the volume of printed materials. One such gem on the USB stick was the fact that 71% of Copenhagen’s hotel rooms are eco-certified with either the Nordic Ecolabel or ISO 14001.
The 24 hours spent in Copenhagen was enough to get an understanding of what the ‘Meetovation’ concept really means and why Copenhagen may be considered one of the leaders in blue sky thinking for how to organise and execute international meetings and conferences to the highest sustainable standards.
The feeling on departure was that ideally Copenhagen could sustain at least 3-4 days more!
