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Photo courtesy of Sevilla Congress & Convention Bureau

Bienvenido de nuevo a españa!

Welcome back to Spain!

Meeting Professionals International, the association’s Iberia Chapter and the Congress and Convention Bureau of Sevilla announced Tuesday that MPI’s European Meetings and Events Conference (EMEC) in 2020 is returning to Spain, heading to the city of Seville.

The conference is tentatively scheduled for Feb. 9-11, 2020, with the Meliá Sevilla serving as the headquarters hotel. EMEC was in Granada, Spain, in 2016.

The announcement of Seville as the next home for EMEC was made as this year’s EMEC closed at the World Forum in The Hague.

“We are very excited to return to Spain for EMEC 2020,” said Darren Temple, chief operations officer for MPI. “Thanks to a strong MPI Iberian Chapter, an appealing destination and an outstanding host venue with the Meliá hotel, we are set up for success. Our events have always performed very strongly in Spain and I am confident that EMEC20 will be the biggest and best yet.”

Planning for the conference is already under way, and MPI will coordinate the program, unlike this year in which EMEC was organized under an agreement with the MPI Netherlands Chapter.

The global MPI team will be using the event design canvas to help identify opportunities for an engaging program in Seville. The event design canvas was used at MPI’s very success World Education Congress last year in Indianapolis.

“I am excited and very happy because it will be a great event,” said Alessia Comis, president of the MPI Iberia Chapter. “I’ve very happy to hear we’re going to plan it with the event design canvas because it is a methodology I believe in.”

Comis said the project will be a challenge for the Iberia Chapter, but added they are ready to begin the arduous undertaking of helping to execute the conference. She’s also hopeful that EMEC will be a boon for Seville’s meeting and event industry.

“The choice of Seville is particularly the right choice because Seville is becoming one of the top players among MICE destinations and it is a city with a lot of assets,” she said. “Many identify Seville as a holiday and MICE destination, and this will be a great opportunity for the city to position itself where it wants to be.”

Yvonne Zegers, business events executive at the Congress and Convention Bureau in Seville, agreed, stating that EMEC will be an opportunity to show the destination to event planners. She said her team has been working with MPI to identify partners in the city that would want to engage the meeting industry audience. The partners include Turespaña, which was represented in The Hague by Ana Román.

Zegers said attendees will be in for a unique experience in the city.

“Seville is very traditional,” she said. “When you think about Spain, you think about something like Seville. We have modern parts but still some very traditional things such as the third-biggest cathedral in the world (Seville Cathedral) and the Royal Alcázar Palace, which is still in use by the royal family and also became more popular as Game of Thrones (television series) was filmed there recently.”