The past and potential exponential growth of the association meetings market has been revealed in a report commissioned to mark ICCA’s 50-year anniversary.

The report, A Modern History of International Association Meetings: 1963- 2012, released at the end of 2013 reveals US$56.4 billion was the aggregated estimated total expenditure on all meetings in the ICCA Association Database that have taken place over the last five years.

ICCA’s membership has increased from just seven members in 1963 to 917 in 2013 and five-year aggregated data of the last 50 years shows that since 1963, the number of meetings in the ICCA Association Database has grown by 10 percent each year. This means the number of regularly-occurring, international association meetings taking place doubled every 10 years.
The pace at which meetings are occuring is also gathering momentum. The database shows 173,432 meetings took place between 1963 and 2012 with 1,795 or one percent of those staged between 1963 and 1967 and 54,844 or 31.6 percent staged between 2008 and 2012.

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