European Cities Marketing Spring Meeting in Belfast
Through our ongoing membership with European Cities Marketing (ECM), not for profit membership association dedicated to strengthening and improving European City Marketing, MU’s cutting edge research helps to benefit tourism organizations across the continent.
MODUL University President, Dr. Karl Wöber, Assistant Professor Dr. Irem Önder, and MSc in International Tourism Management student Elizabeth Shanaman represented MU at the annual spring meeting, held in Belfast, Northern Ireland from February 26th-28th. The topic of the conference was “Future challenges: Smart cities, green meetings, sustainable tourism”, especially pertinent for our faculty given MU’s focus on sustainable tourism.
Each year, MU plays an integral part in furthering the organization by preparing the European Cities Benchmarking report which was presented at the conference. The first results of the 2013 report indicate that international city tourism (+4.3%) is growing faster than the domestic city tourism (+1.7%) in Europe, compared to 2012. China and Russia are main source markets for European city tourism, continung their high growth with 12.1% and 10.6% respectively. Japan, Spain and Italy showed decreases in number of bednights compared to last year. The top three best performing cities in terms of bednights are London (+5.9%), Paris (+3.6%), and Rome (+6.0%).
MODUL University Vienna and European Cities Marketing also signed a mutual agreement that indicates that the university will advise ECM and its members on sharing information, benchmarking, and generally all tasks related to creating knowledge about city tourism industry.
Additionally, Ms. Shanaman presented the results of the survey regarding European city events and how to promote events in the cities on social media.
The next meeting of the ECM will be in Dresden, Germany on June 4th-7th, 2014.
Pictured: Ignasi de Delas, President of ECM and head of Barcelona Tourism, left, Dr. Karl Wöber right
