Poland’s cultural capital Krakow is not only a popular tourist destination but a savvy choice for planners and agents looking for value. It was a host city of Poland’s Presidency in the European Council in 2011 and it hosted three football teams’ camps during Eu sro 2012. Last year the city hosted 180 major conferences and conventions, and 250 exhibitions. It is the second largest MICE in Poland after Warsaw.
Next year two major congress centres come on stream in the city, as well as one new tradefair venue.
ICE Krakow Congress Centre is on track to open in autumn 2014 and will offer 36,000sqm of conference space, including an auditorium able to host 2,000 people. Two other halls, Theatre Hall and Chamber Hall, will host 600 and 300 delegates respectively.
The centre is built with its own transport complex encompassing ground and below level car parks and a bus terminal. Transfer to the airport from ICE takes about 20 minutes.
A second major venue, International Exhibition and Convention Centre EXPO Krakow, will also come on stream in 2014 and offer 9,000sqm of exhibition space and meeting rooms. The main hall can be used for congresses for up to 4,000 delegates.
Another congress centre, the Arena is set to open at the end of 2013.
Krakow is also big on heritage and culture and hosts numerous festivals.
Krakow is a bustling university city and its Market Square is one of the largest and most beautiful in Europe.
Within delegate reach is the Wieliczka Salt Mine, the Tatra mountains and the mountain resort of Zakopane. Local incentives specialists, Mazurkas DMC, is one of many companies now offering options for delegates keen to experience the region’s attractions.
Something brewing in Bohemia
While Prague dominates the Czech section of most agency incentives programmes, Philip Cooke, MD of Destination Marketing Group in the UK, recently visited Western Bohemia and cracks open the conference case for Pilsen:
“Pilsen is a historic city with excellent facilities for meetings and suffers, like most Czech cities, from being cast in the big shadow of the capital.
“While it may not rival Prague for large association business, Pilsen is worth considering for medium-sized conferences, and hosts a steady stream of factory inspections and business meetings, especially for the engineering and new-technology sectors.
“Many East European destinations face a huge problem in that many outside their countries have never heard of them. Thanks to Pilsner Urquell beer and the Skoda engineering works, the city is on the map in the public consciousness, at least.
“Pilsen is a 2015 European Capital of Culture, as well as a centre for engineering and manufacturing. It has a technology-orientated University and is a major transport hub, all strands that can connect to meetings business.
“Located 50 miles west of Prague, Pilsen may be psychologically in the East of Europe, yet London, Oslo, Bucharest, Athens, Rome and Paris are all roughly equidistant, not a bad line when pitching to a pan-European delegate audience.
“Hotels in the city able to host conferences include the four-star, 150-room Parkhotel Congress Centre, able to cater for 1,500 delegates. GM Libor Vlach says that when the project began: ‘We were told that it couldn’t be done and it wouldn’t work, that Prague was too powerful to take on as a conference destination. Well, it has been done and it does work’.
“The Courtyard by Marriott Pilsen is a four-star conference hotel with 178 bedrooms and five conference rooms in the city centre and boasts a large ballroom and business centre. The Angelo Hotel Pilsen has 144 bedrooms and four conference rooms. In the three-star market the Ibis Pilsen offers two conference rooms able to hold 70 delegates each.
“At the Pilsner Brewery Museum delegates can discover the original 19th century brewery. Pilsen uses a unique cold fermentation process which became the source of the many pale, less-bitter beers we now call lager.”
Sochi salto for meetings legacy
The Russian Government has been pouring billions of roubles into a construction effort designed to present a face of a new winter wonderland to the world when the Sochi Olympic Games open in less than a year.
With a total budget of US$18bn, Sochi 2014 is shaping up to be the most expensive Winter Olympics in history.
In Vancouver, infrastructure improvements included renovating the Rogers Arena and BC Place Stadium, a new Olympic oval, curling venue and convention centre, but the outlay was relatively modest by comparison.
In Russia, everything is being built exclusively for the Games. That includes not only every venue for the ice events that will be contested in a coastal cluster on the Black Sea, but a whole mountain resort at Krasnaya Polyana to host the alpine events, and new hotels for athletes, media and spectators.
Highways are being improved although one Russian website reported that for the amount spent, one road might as well have been coated in caviar.
Transport improvements will cut journey time between Moscow and Sochi in half and Russia, like China in 2008, is transforming itself through the Olympics and the business community should feel the benefits long afterwards.
Sochi Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov has plans to make the region a year-round training centre for elite athletes as part of the Olympic legacy.
“You watch the Russians build their Olympic performance like London did with Team GB,” he says.
Dmitry Chernyshenko, President and CEO of Sochi 2014, says that bidding for major international events, from the Olympics to the FIFA World Cup (to be held in Russia in 2018), “is a deliberate strategy from our leadership and the impact will go well beyond sports“.
Jobs have followed the investment: 76,000 workers have been employed in the lead up to the Games and the meetings industry will be able to use the 27,000 new hotel rooms being built.
Pakhomov describes the transformation effort as “a good example of how venues and a sporting event can change a whole region”.
There are many more steps East in Europe for meeting planners and events industry professionals looking for business partners and opportunities.
The most enterprising of event contractors have already clinched lucrative supply contracts in this and other emerging meetings markets.
This was first published in Issue 71/2013 of CMW. Any comments? Email cmw@mashmedia.net
