The St. Gallen Breast Cancer Conference, which brings together 4,000 oncologists, is just one of four big international medical conferences that the Austria Center Vienna has attracted to the Austrian capital for 2015.
St. Gallen passes the torch to the Austria Center Vienna. The St. Gallen International Breast Cancer Conference has taken place 13 times in St. Gallen, Switzerland, at intervals of two to three years since 1982. The large influx of international delegates–the number of participants recently reached 4,000–poses major challenges for the local hotel industry. “The success of this gathering is above all due to the numerous advances in breast cancer research in recent years, and our conference, which always closes with the update to the international St. Gallen treatment consensus, is firmly established as one of the most important knowledge platforms in oncology worldwide,” said conference co-president Professor Hansjorg Senn of the ZeTuP Center for Tumor Detection, Treatment and Prevention in St. Gallen.
Austria Center Vienna a front runner from the start At Austria’s largest conference centre, participants will enjoy 8,500m² of event space, of which 4,900m² will be available for presentations and workshops, and 3,600m² will make up exhibition space. This means that in Vienna the meeting has the potential to grow even further.
The decisive factors for Prof. Senn and the rest of the organisational team at the St. Gallen Oncology Conferences foundation (SONK) were the professionalism of the Austria Center Vienna staff and its service partners–in particular local conference organiser Mondial–as well as the geographical location and excellent transport links. It takes just seven minutes to reach the historic city centre from the Austria Center Vienna by underground, and only 30 minutes to get to the airport. In addition, close collaboration with the destination and Vienna’s hotel capacity especially helped to sway the decision. Four four-star hotels within the Donauplatte development in the immediate vicinity of the conference centre offer a total of 923 rooms within walking distance, and thousands more rooms are available in every price category in the city centre with its wide range of cultural attractions.
SONK and the International Breast Cancer Study Group (IBCSG), which will also assist with organisation of the conference in Vienna, are looking forward to working with the President of the Austrian Breast & Colorectal Cancer Study Group (ABCSG), Professor Michael Gnant of the Medical University of Vienna’s Department of Surgery, and his colleagues.
For Susanne Baumann-Sollner, Chief Executive Officer of IAKWG-AG, the company that operates the Austria Center Vienna, this new conference represents confirmation of the venue’s new strategic direction. “St. Gallen is one the most important centres for breast cancer research worldwide, and the breast cancer conference that has grown up there over
many years is a model that has gained outstanding international recognition. It is a great honour for us to be able to take over from St. Gallen as the hosts the conference. Our overarching goal is to offer participants an ideal setting for knowledge transfer, as well as the right atmosphere for digital and face-to-face networking. It isn’t just our conference centre and service partners that will be pulling in the same direction–Vienna as a whole will help us to achieve this aim,” Baumann-Sollner commented.
2015–medical conferences on the rise
“Medical conferences are a major focus both in 2015 and subsequent years,” Baumann-Sollner said, previewing the bookings in this sector. In addition to the St. Gallen International Breast Cancer Conference, a number of other major congresses will each attract between 1,000 and 20,000 physicians next year, including the European Congress of Radiology
(ECR) in March, the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Retina Specialists in July, and the European Congress of Immunology (ECI) in June. As usual, the European Geosciences Union General Assembly will take place in April, with 12,400 experts gathering in Vienna. Taken together, these five conferences will bring around 45,700 visitors to the Austria Center Vienna. Contracts for further events are due to be signed soon.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
