Congress and Meetings Tourism and Destination Brand

Abstract — Congress tourism has been enforcing its presence in global industry despite recent years of economical hardship and it is becoming more and more important. This tourist field is a high level sector, which involves a lot of people and money. In fact, it is a kind of tourism that requires organization, intermediary, high capacity destinations and high territorial and human resources. Destination management is increasing as a professional way to study congress destination characteristics, meetings requirements and customer satisfaction in order to optimize the hosting process and promote destination brand. The tourism sector offers benefits and impacts in many different ways and completely changes the way we understand tourist destinations. Firstly, we are going to consider this kind of tourism as a tourist segment. Secondly, we are going to focus on what are the factors that influence the choice of a congress destination. Finally, we are going to analyze the demand and the offer in Spanish tourism industry to understand the reason why it is so well located in global ranking. Keywords- Congress tourism; Destination management; Congress requirements and impacts. I