By Andrea Pimpini, Master’s Candidate and Research Assistant at University of Macau
Macau’s case for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions is, on the surface, a strong one. Few cities of this size pack in so much convention space, so many five-star hotel rooms, and such short travel times to both Hong Kong International Airport and the mainland’s high-speed rail network. The integrated resorts-built ballrooms and exhibition halls originally to complement their gaming floors, and over the past decade those spaces have become genuine assets in their own right, hosting everything from medical congresses to trade fairs to gaming industry conventions. Add growing direct flight connections from Southeast Asia and mainland China, and Macau’s pitch to event planners is straightforward: a small, walkable, well-connected city where delegates can hold a conference by day and eat exceptionally well by night.
What Macau has been slower to build is a reason for people to come back outside conference season, or a flagship event so strongly associated with the city that it drives bookings on its own. Most successful MICE destinations eventually pair their venue capacity with at least one signature event that generates demand independent of any single client industry, something that fills hotel rooms, earns media coverage, and gives the destination an identity beyond its meeting rooms.
Italy offers an instructive, if unusual, comparison. The Sanremo Music Festival, a five-day event held each February in a town of roughly 55,000 people, has grown into an economic event of national significance. Recent estimates put its impact on the local economy at over 200 million euro in a single edition, driven not just by hotel stays and restaurant spending but by the value of national television coverage and the boost to the town’s profile as a destination. The format proved durable and exportable enough that it directly inspired the Eurovision Song Contest, now one of the largest recurring media events in the world, and it has close cousins in Latin America’s Vina del Mar International Song Festival in Chile. None of these began as a tourism strategy. They began as cultural events, and the tourism and hospitality industries around them learned to build on that later.
Macau already has the physical infrastructure to attempt something similar, arguably more so than Sanremo did when it started in 1951. What it has lacked is a single recurring event, tied to a fixed date every year, built with enough scale and enough of a distinct identity that it becomes a reason to visit independent of any trade show or conference calendar. The city has cultural material to draw on: its own musical and performance traditions, its Portuguese-Chinese heritage, and an existing calendar of events, including the Macao International Music Festival and the Formula 3 Grand Prix, that already draw crowds but have not been developed into the kind of globally recognizable format that Eurovision or Sanremo represent.
This is where MICE strategy and cultural tourism should overlap more than they currently do. A signature annual event does not only fill hotel rooms during its own run; it also gives meeting planners a reason to schedule adjacent conferences and incentive trips around it, in the same way exhibitors sometimes plan trade show attendance around a well-known festival elsewhere. It generates media coverage that functions as marketing for the destination as a whole, at a fraction of what an equivalent advertising campaign would cost. And it gives Macau’s off-peak months, which is when convention business tends to be thinnest, a fixed point of demand to plan around.
Building convention centers and courting international associations will remain the backbone of Macau’s MICE strategy, and rightly so. But venues alone are a commodity that other Asian cities can match with enough capital. Harder to copy is a cultural event that becomes tied to a place’s identity over years of repetition. Macau has the resources, the connectivity and, in its cultural mix, the raw material. What it needs now is the willingness to commit to one format long enough for it to become a habit, both for visitors and for the industry that plans its calendar around them.
Andrea Pimpini has a BBA in Economics and Management from the University of Chieti-Pescara. He moved in Macau in December 2023, calling it his “new home”, and after some work experience in the city under working visa, he’s currently student of the MSc in International Integrated Resort Management at the University of Macau. Andrea has won multiple erasmus+ scholarships and also taken courses offered by the CERGE-EI Foundation.
Andrea Pimpini is a research assistant and MSc Candidate in International Integrated Resort Management at the University of Macau. His research focuses on tourism diversification, hospitality strategy, and cultural branding in Asia. He has published commentary on gaming and tourism in international outlets and is currently exploring the intersection of wellness, technology, and integrated resorts in Macau.