Sitges Tourism

The Sitges Convention Bureau celebrates twenty years promoting congress and meeting tourism in the municipality.

Sitges has consolidated its position as a key hub for meetings, congress and incentive trips, and has become the destination with the highest volume of bussines in Catalonia after Barcelona.

The Sitges Convention Bureau, the Sitges Town Council's Tourism Department's meetings tourism programme, celebrates its twentieth anniversary in 2024. The main objective of the programme, a public-private partnership involving companies specialising in the business tourism segment, is to promote the town as a MICE destination (congress, convention and incentive travel tourism).

In these two decades, the Sitges CB has positioned the town as a leader in the promotion of meetings, incentive, congress and exhibition tourism both nationally and internationally. In fact, in April it was awarded ‘Best Destination Promotion’ at the MPI Iberian Awards, which recognise this boost in the promotion of Sitges as a receptive place for this sector. The programme provides advice on hotels, meeting rooms, unique spaces, post-meeting activities, mobility and municipal permits. It is also the City Council's way of publicising all the resources available to the town in the field of meeting tourism. Sitges has more than 3,000 hotel beds in 4 and 5 star establishments, 100 meeting rooms, 2 convention centres and an auditorium for 1,400 attendees.

The destination hosts an average of 600 meetings a year, of which almost 50% are international. The most important sectors that choose the municipality for their meetings and business meetings are the pharmaceutical, technology, insurance, automotive, banking and industries such as textiles, food and sports. The councillor for Tourism, Xavier Ripoll, assures that ‘this type of tourism complements sun and beach tourism, and helps to decentralise the season, giving the possibility to hotels, restaurants and establishments to have a more sustained work throughout the year, also during the months of September to May’. Ripoll added that ‘the Sitges CB will continue to work to promote the destination using the knowledge generated, experience, creativity and imagination, and reinforcing strategic axes, such as sustainability and rationalisation of resources’.
Some of the most important congresses and conventions that Sitges has hosted in recent years have been the HIMSS Europe And Health 2.0 Conference, held in 2018 with more than 2,000 people, the World Congress of Hair Research with up to 1,000 people in 2019, or the European Car-T Cell Meeting, which in 2020 brought together 1,200 people.

In addition to national and international commercial actions, presentations and support for local companies and event organisers, the Sitges Convention Bureau has also developed part of its tasks in the field of technology and research. It has collaborated in studies, together with the Event Management Institute (EMI) and the University of Barcelona, which have helped to decipher the elements involved in the decision process of a destination or a space, as well as the destination and the physical spaces as conditioning factors in communication.

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