After an absence of two years, ICCA announced the return of the annual Country and City Rankings for the year 2022. The results were presented yesterday at IMEX Frankfurt. All meetings of associations, which had taken place either purely live or hybrid, were included in the evaluation.

In the global ranking, the USA came first in a country comparison with 690 on-site meetings in 2022, followed by Spain with 528 meetings and Italy (522). Germany came fourth (484), ahead of France (472) and the UK (449).

In the city ranking, Vienna was able to defend its top position; 162 meetings were held in the Austrian capital. Second and third place went to Lisbon (144 meetings) and Paris (142). berlin was the best German city with 113 meetings and came seventh.

ICCA’s research team identified over 10,500 meetings of which some 9,000 meetings were held in-person, being either unaffected by COVID-19 or held in a hybrid format. As the association meetings industry is still catching up to the numbers of the last pre-pandemic year (13,254 meetings in 2019), ICCA conducted a brief country and city comparative analysis based on rankings rather than number of meetings.

“This is a tremendous undertaking by our team, one that is most welcomed by our members because the ICCA Country – and City – Rankings always generates huge industry interest. It’s heartening to see the drive towards in-person meetings is once more very strong and we predict this trend will grow throughout the coming year”, said ICCA CEO, Senthil Gopinath.