Antwerp will be home to a city centre meetings venue in 2016, one that Belgium hopes will ignite the MICE industry in the diamond capital.
The Flanders Meeting and Convention Centre is being pitched as a large meetings prospect in a genuine city centre location, combining “the best of the old with all the necessities from the modern, and the technical”, in the words of the venue’s Chief Commercial Officer, Anja Stas.
Speaking to the crowds gathered at RTE’s EIBTM in Barcelona, Stas said the venue would be a place of “pleasure and inspiration”, and do much to help fill the city’s 4,600 hotel rooms.
“Opening at the end of 2016, this will be a state-of-the art centre for knowledge exchange adjacent to the central station. You arrive, walk out of the main entrance to the station and in three minutes you’re in the convention centre,” she said.
The belle époque-style 25,000sqm venue includes 20 modular meeting rooms and 30 breakout rooms. The main Queen Elizabeth Hall offers 2,000 seats. Access will be through a large sunlit 2,100sqm atrium, and the venue offers direct access to Antwerp zoo, one of the five founding zoos of the 18th Century.
The adjacent zoo adds much to the venue, with this access a key part of the venue offering, enabling delegates to go jogging in the morning prior to the zoo’s public visiting hours, or to dine with fish at night as part of a ready-to-go entertainment programme.
Acoustics are set to be one of the venue’s greatest selling points. The main hall, designed by Ian Simpson & Kirkegaard, will be home to the Royal Flemish Philharmonic orchestra, a fact Stas claims guarantees the 9.3-rated acoustics are “top-end”.
This was first published in issue 78 of CMW. Any comments? Email Zoe Vernor
