The relationship between lodging and meetings gets stronger every year and this trend will inevitably continue, especially in those destinations that are firstly suited to business.
A powerful instrument that links hotels to PCOs and vice versa is Meeting e Congressi, official magazine of the MICE industry, whose website provides support to locating the perfect venue for an event. Playing with the platform filters, it comes out that in Italy there are over 2.400 hotels listed as offering meeting facilities, more than a half of which positioned in the Upscale segment, for a total of over 10.700 meeting rooms. As one may expect, most properties are located in big cities like Milan, Rome, Turin and Naples, often providing more than 3-4 meeting rooms. Problems arise when filtering by number of participants: only 430 hotels in the whole Country can host conventions with more than 300 people, amount that decreases to 180 when considering events with more than 500 people. The options for accommodation are even more niched: less than 300 hotels featuring meeting facilities have more than 150 keys. Most of them are operated by international or domestic chains.
As for size in rooms and meeting facilities, some of the best conference hotels in Italy are the JSH Ripamonti Residence (916 keys, Milan), the Sheraton Parco De’ Medici (815, Rome), the CDSHotel Terrasini in Sicily (800, Terrasini – Palermo) recently re-branded, the Sheraton Rome Hotel & Conference in Rome (604, EUR – Rome), the Rome Marriott Park Hotel (601, Rome), the UNA Hotel Expo Fiera in Milan (527, Pero – Milan), the Hilton Rome Airport Hotel (517, Fiumicino – Rome), the Ibis Hotel Milano Centro (439, Milan), the Hilton Rome Eur Lama (439, EUR – Rome), opening in May 2020 and attached to the “La Nuvola” congress center, the Sheraton Milan Malpensa Airport Hotel & Conference Centre (433, Malpensa – Milan).