From Filling Rooms to Changing Places: What I Took from the CityDNA Summer School in Dijon

I spent this week in Dijon at the 40th City Destinations Alliance Summer School, surrounded by people working across convention bureaus, associations, PCOs, corporate meetings, sustainability, technology and destination development.

The programme covered a lot of ground, from bidding and client expectations to inclusion, legacy, AI and the changing role of convention bureaux. Across these discussions, a fairly coherent picture of the business-events industry emerged.

Convention bureaus are moving beyond selling destination product. Increasingly, our role is to understand what an organisation wants to achieve, determine whether our destination has something relevant to contribute, bring the right people together locally and demonstrate afterwards what the meeting actually achieved.

The right meeting can be more valuable than the biggest meeting

For years, much of the business-events discussion has been dominated by delegate numbers, hotel nights and economic impact. Those indicators remain important, particularly when public funding is involved, but they describe only part of the value of a meeting.

A congress can bring new knowledge into a city, connect researchers internationally, support professional education, introduce companies to a local cluster, influence policy, attract talent or create new research and business relationships. Some of those outcomes may continue developing years after the delegates have gone home.

This changes how destinations should approach acquisition.

The useful sequence discussed in Dijon was essentially: can we host the event, should we pursue it, can we realistically win it, can we add value, and is the effort worthwhile?

That requires more discipline than simply building the largest possible sales pipeline. A 250-person specialist congress that is closely connected to a destination’s university, hospital or business ecosystem may ultimately be more valuable than a considerably larger event with little connection to the place.

This is particularly relevant for smaller destinations. They do not need to compete with major cities across every sector. They can become extremely relevant within selected fields where they have genuine expertise.

The destination product is increasingly the ecosystem

The sessions with association clients, corporate planners and PCOs reinforced another change. Lists of hotels, venues and restaurants are becoming less valuable as information becomes easier to obtain.

The convention bureau adds value through interpretation.

Which venue actually works for this event? Which local organisation should be involved? Who is the right academic or business contact? Where are the risks? What can realistically be delivered? Which partners can be trusted?

The destination being sold is therefore much larger than its tourism inventory. It includes universities, hospitals, companies, research organisations, government, venues, hotels, transport providers, local communities and people with specialist knowledge.

A strong convention bureau knows how to connect these parts around the objectives of an event.

That also changes the relationship with PCOs and DMCs. Their value is increasingly found in judgement, integration, creativity and risk management rather than simply processing information or organising logistics.

Legacy needs to begin before the event is won

Legacy was discussed throughout the week, and the most useful interpretation was also one of the simplest: what should be different because this meeting happened here?

That question needs to be asked early.

If a medical congress could improve professional knowledge locally, the relevant healthcare organisations need to be involved before the event. If an industry congress could support investment or research collaboration, economic-development organisations and companies need to be part of the process. If an event could influence a societal issue, the people affected by that issue need a role.

Legacy therefore cannot be something added to an event programme after the bid has been won. It needs to influence which events a destination pursues in the first place.

There is still an unresolved measurement problem. Hotel nights and visitor spending are comparatively easy to calculate. Knowledge transfer, new research relationships, talent attraction or policy influence are considerably harder to measure, particularly when outcomes appear years later.

If the industry wants to make a credible case for this broader value, it will also have to become much better at producing evidence for it.

Evidence is becoming more important than adjectives

This applied equally to sustainability and inclusion.

Calling an event sustainable says very little. The useful questions concern what was actually reduced, how delegates travelled, whether public transport was practical, how compact the event was and what was measured.

The same applies to accessibility and inclusion. Saying that a venue is accessible is very different from examining the complete delegate journey, including booking, transportation, hotels, stages, toilets, hearing and visual support, sensory requirements, language, dietary needs and religious considerations.

One framework from the inclusion discussions captured the approach particularly well: See, Shape, Share. See who has not been considered, shape decisions around their participation and share what was actually changed.

The broader principle applies well beyond inclusion. Destination organisations need to become more precise about what they claim and better at showing the evidence behind those claims.

Speed and relationships still win business

There was also a very pragmatic commercial message throughout the week.

Clients want useful answers quickly.

A perfect response delivered too late can be less valuable than a good response that allows the client to move forward. Corporate planners in particular emphasised speed, while association and PCO discussions repeatedly returned to trust, transparency and having someone locally who takes responsibility.

Technology will make information faster to obtain, but it does not remove these expectations. If anything, it raises them.

Convention bureaus will increasingly be valued for knowing the destination well enough to make recommendations rather than simply supplying information.

AI is already changing this equation

AI inevitably became part of the discussion, and I was pleased that the conversation went considerably further than content generation.

Examples included RFP (request for proposal) analysis, bid preparation, market research, operational checks, conference transcription, delegate personalisation, sustainability analysis, impact planning and internal decision support. The more significant development is the gradual movement from isolated AI tasks towards AI becoming an intelligence layer across organisations.

There is another development that convention bureaus need to consider seriously. Meeting planners will increasingly ask AI where they should hold their next meeting.

That changes destination discovery.

A destination’s information needs to be accurate, public, structured and understandable by machines. Capacity, accessibility, connectivity, sustainability credentials, sector expertise and previous event outcomes increasingly form part of the information environment from which AI systems make recommendations.

At the same time, AI is making generic information less valuable.

If a planner needs a list of hotels, AI can already provide one. The convention bureau becomes valuable when it knows which hotel is right for that particular meeting, understands the local context and can connect the organiser with people who can help achieve its objectives.

In that sense, AI may make the human part of destination work more valuable rather than less.

Is this meeting worth the trip?

There is also a more difficult question that the business-events industry will increasingly have to answer.

International meetings require travel, and travel carries an environmental cost. The industry can improve public transport, choose lower-impact suppliers, reduce waste and make events more efficient, but international aviation remains difficult to avoid.

The argument for physical meetings therefore needs to become stronger.

If people travel across continents to sit in a room and consume information they could have received online, the justification becomes increasingly weak. If the meeting produces collaboration, knowledge exchange, business development, scientific progress or societal outcomes that would not otherwise happen, the discussion becomes very different.

The question may increasingly become: was this meeting worth the trip?

I think that is a healthy question for our industry.

From travel agents to change agents

Perhaps the clearest description of the direction of convention bureaus during the week was that we should increasingly think of ourselves as change agents rather than travel agents.

Logistics remain fundamental. A destination still needs the right venues, accommodation, accessibility, connectivity and professional suppliers. These are the licence to compete.

They are increasingly not enough to win.

The competitive advantage comes from understanding why the meeting exists and connecting that purpose with something meaningful in the destination.

For Oulu, this reinforces a direction I already believe is important. We should not try to become the destination for every conference. We should identify the conferences where our universities, technology companies, healthcare expertise, research communities, northern environment and wider societal strengths allow us to contribute something distinctive.

The ambition should be quite simple: when the right conference comes to Oulu, something should happen here that could not have happened quite as effectively somewhere else.

That is a considerably more interesting definition of success than filling rooms.