In order to underline Cologne’s significant standing as a convention destination, the Cologne Convention Bureau has joined forces with the European Institute for the Meetings Industry (EITW) to introduce an online statistics tool. Since the beginning of 2009, managers of local convention and congress venues have been supplying data relating to their events online on a monthly basis via the Conference Barometer. The EITW gathers additional data once a year, including information from potential customers relating to trends and preferences in the conventions market. These results are incorporated into an annual report, which is now available for the year 2010.

During 2010, about 42,750 events, attended by 3.3 million participants, took place in Cologne. Of the different types of venue, event locations led the field, attracting over a third of the total participants.

There has been growth, comparison with 2009, in both the number of events and the number of participants. This growth can be seen clearly in the number of events that took place in the second half of 2010, confirming that the Cologne conventions market has recovered from the economic crisis. The locations have seen a 5 % increase in use overall. Hotel bookings resulting from the conventions market increased on average by 50 room-nights to 971 roomnights per hotel per month. Assuming 4.57 million overnight stays in Cologne hotels in total in 2010, these projected overnight stays would make up 27.6 % of hotel tourism in Cologne and produce a turnover of about 160 million euros.

As in the previous year, about two thirds (65 %) of the congress and convention organisers in Cologne are from the business sector. In first place, as before, are the banks, followed by the medical sector. The data processing business was more present in 2010 than before. The non-profit-making sector (35 %) is dominated by private organisers, followed by various associations and social institutions. Cultural events have slightly decreased in significance.

Overall, Cologne has become more important to event organisers and is one of the leading conference and event destinations in Germany. This is confirmed by a survey of event organisers that was carried out as an additional analysis in the organiser monitoring included in the Conference Barometer. It is worth noting that on a national scale, 98 % of the organisers surveyed accorded Cologne a very high or high significance.

These positive developments are also confirmed by the Germany-wide survey of the EITW’s Meeting & EventBarometer, in which, for the first time, the Cologne-Dusseldorf region achieved third place in the popularity stakes among German event organisers, after Berlin/Potsdam and the Rhine-Main-Region (Frankfurt).

Apart from the “usual” convention organisers from the corporate and non-profitmaking domains, there is also great potential for convention organisers in the scientific community in Cologne, with its 12 universities/colleges and other scientific institutions, a fact that is known in the city. In order to establish more points of contact, professors from the University of Cologne were included in the Conference Barometer survey for the first time.

This survey shows that the information and communications strategy of the CCB and the scientific marketing of the universities and colleges need to be linked more closely if their joint efforts are to bring more events, particularly large congresses, to Cologne. Because of the de-centralised organisational structure in the scientific institutions, no concrete joint form of communication or action has yet been found for publicising the full potential of the scientific convention market. This point will, however, be the focus of intensive work in the future.

Until now, the professors have held their conventions mainly (75 %) in their own institutions, but they also use other locations 25 % of the time. The reason for this may be that there are not enough facilities available for large congresses. This was also confirmed in the above-mentioned survey of convention organisers, in which 59 % of the organisers described the availability of convention locations for congresses (with more than 2,000 participants) in Cologne as “inadequate”.

Altogether, on average, 3.1 conventions are arranged by each university professor each year, of which just a fifth involve more than 250 participants. With about 700 professors in the six faculties of the University of Cologne alone, this represents a very considerable potential for conventions, 90 % of which take place in Cologne. The Cologne professors are loyal to Cologne.