Types of events held at professional meeting venues in the Waikato, New Zealand

MICE: meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions.
Delegate capacity: The delegate capacity for a venue is defined as the largest number of business event delegates that can be comfortably hosted at one time in spaces regularly used to host business events within the venue. The estimate is based on minimal partitioning and theatre style set up of free-form spaces. The capacity of spaces used only for non-business events (for example, concerts and sporting events) is excluded from the reported delegate capacity.
Meetings/seminars: A meeting or seminar is defined as a formal gathering of people to discuss matters of shared interest, usually within a single session.
Incentive activities: An incentive activity is defined as an activity occurring at a venue that incentivises or rewards the invited event delegates for exceptional business achievement.
Conferences/Conventions: A conference or convention is described as a formal gathering of people at a venue to discuss matters of shared interest involving multiple sessions and speakers.
Trade shows/exhibitions: Trade shows and exhibitions are defined as a showcase of goods and services held for the benefit of a specific industry.
Special Occasion activities: Special occasion activities are defined as a social gathering or celebration, for example, a gala dinner, ball, graduation, cocktail party, birthday party, or wedding.

Thirteen out of the nineteen Convention Bureaux participate in the Convention Research Programme (CRP). As such, the CRP is not a national programme but covers a significant majority of conference/convention activity in New Zealand. The participating Convention Bureaux are Auckland, Hamilton and Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Rotorua, Taupo, Hawke’s Bay, Manawatu, Wellington, Marlborough, Nelson, Christchurch and Canterbury, Dunedin and Queenstown.

The business event activity measured includes meeting/seminar, incentive activity,conference/convention, trade show/exhibition, and special occasions.

To qualify for inclusion in the Business Events Activity Survey a venue must:
- promote their venue as suitable for a range of business-related MICE activities, especially conventions/conferences and meetings
- have theatre-style minimum delegate capacity of 50
- aim or plan to host a minimum of 12 conventions and/or business related events each year.

At the beginning of the December 2014 quarter, the definition for qualifying trade shows and exhibitions was changed. As the focus of the survey is on business events, events that are primarily directed at the public (i.e. consumer events) such as home shows and A&P shows are now excluded. These consumer or public oriented events typically involve a large number of different attendees and can run for several days. Where these types of events have been included, they have a marked impact on the reported number of delegates and delegate days in this business event category and on total delegates and delegate days. To allow for consistent comparison between the years 2013 and 2014 in the year end December 2014 report, these consumer events were removed from the data set for these years. This also allows for consistent year to year comparisons in this report and future reports. Comparisons to reporting periods that include quarters prior to 2013 should not be made at a total level or for trade shows and exhibitions as the definition of trade shows and exhibitions is not consistent across these time periods.

An imputation methodology is used to estimate MICE activity for venues that are included in the CAS but which are missing some data or are not supplying data at all.
Previously, over 2009-2012, the method of estimating missing data was to apply weighting to the reported regional level data based on the capacity for the region. This weighting was calculated as: The total reported delegate capacity for the region/The delegate capacity of the venues that submitted data
In 2013, the nearest neighbour method was chosen to estimate missing venue data. Under this methodology the events recorded each month by venues are aggregated into quarter years. If a venue only reports for one month in the quarter, those values are taken as representative of the whole quarter. If a venue reports for two months, the missing month is estimated as the average of the other two.
This quarterly data is then combined with the full list of qualifying venues so that the dataset includes those venues that have registered with the survey and supplied data, those that have registered without supplying data and those that have not registered.

At URL provided, select 'Pivot table for year ended June 2019'.

The Convention Activity Survey (now called Business Events Activity Survey) monitors and benchmarks the performance of more than 300 professional conferencing and meeting venues in New Zealand. It is is the 'supply-side' component of the Convention Research Programme.
The Business Events Activity Survey measures business event activity at qualifying venues in New Zealand.
The Business Events Activity Survey is part of a broader Convention Research Programme, in which the Convention Delegate Survey measures the annual contribution of multi-day convention and conference activity to the New Zealand economy