“ Understanding how a destination operates within its community is now an essential ingredient to successful meeting and event planning.”
Leader
Legacy and impact, rising to the top of the order
Managing editor, Paul Colston
L egacy is clearly moving up the
international meetings agenda and the Destinations International column on p15 reinforces this feeling, illustrating why planners are now taking a harder look at destinations.
A destination that appears strong on paper may have local conditions misaligned with event needs, stakeholder support or operational capacity. Questions that once emerged late in the process about local community support and sentiment are now being raised at the outset and understanding how a destination operates within its community is now an essential ingredient to successful meeting and event planning.
Tourism Canada’ s recent Business Events Legacy and Impact Study, reviewed on p18-19, is more powerful evidence that the idea of legacy has moved from a nice ambition to a strategic requirement. Usual meetings metrics still matter, the study notes, but they no longer reflect the full story – expectations are shifting. The valuable Canadian research is fruit of a multi-year study. Rather than focusing solely on immediate economic return, it evaluates outcomes that emerge months and years after an event concludes. These include social, intellectual, policy, human, cultural and financial outcomes, measured using a standardised Impact Measurement Framework developed by # MEET4IMPACT. And, p17, CityDNA dissects how tourism promotion is now operating within the social contract.
The issue of AI is also dominant and Paul Cook’ s article, p42, asks some important questions around whether we are using the right guardrails at this stage.
There are more thought-provoking strategies from Constantine Bridgeman’ s Producers Room, p27, on building agents to help lower Customer Acquistion Costs and a framework for operationalisng AI for conferencing.
On a darker note, it seems tourism and hospitality leaders are being drawn into the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, with Thomas Pritzker, executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels resigning after details of an affiliation was revealed in documents related to the ongoing investigation. Fallout has also affected DinoCon, a UK event for paleontologists which drew 1,000 delegates to Birmingham in 2025. Organisers banned a number of researchers revealed also to have connections to Epstein. A very different and worrying kind of‘ legacy’, for sure. n
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MANAGING EDITOR PAUL COLSTON pcolston @ mashmedia. net
PORTFOLIO DIRECTOR IAIN STIRLING istirling @ mashmedia. net
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HEAD OF MARKETING JONNY HAMMOND jhammond @ mashmedia. net
INTERNATIONAL SALES MANAGER MYRAN BALASINGHAM mbalasingham @ mashmedia. net
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ISSUE 141 / CONFERENCE & MEETINGS WORLD / 3 |