Revitalizing Business Tourism in the European Union: Strategies for Growth

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic had a disastrous effect on the growth in business tourism, emphasizing the role of information and communication technologies in the implementation of new meeting models. Consequently, new needs and concerns of the business tourist may have arisen, which should lead business tourism organizations to consider new attributes in their value proposition. Thus, this study aims to understand the determinants of business tourism spending and the number of business meetings, in the European Union, to aid the formulation of economic and marketing policies, in the post-pandemic period. For this purpose, a literature review is carried out for the periods before, during, and after the pandemic phase; additionally, a panel data analysis is performed using data from the 28 countries in the European Union. The results identify new typologies of determinants, describing first-order (global-scale) and second-order (European-scale) determinants and identifying important practical implications.

Business tourism in an African city: Evidence from Harare, Zimbabwe

“…Research on business tourism continues to attract attention from tourism scholars in the Global North (Borodako et al, 2019;Celuch, 2019;Davidson, 2019;Bik, Poreda & Matczak, 2020;Arcodia, 2023;Carvalho, 2023;Celuch, 2023). In the Global South, however, it remains a somewhat neglected theme despite its significance in many leading urban tourism destinations (Rogerson & Rogerson, 2021b).…”

“…After the COVID-19 pandemic, research topics also include the role of technology in transforming business events, the growing popularity of hybrid business events as part of the new normal (Lekgau & Tichaawa, 2022a;Litvinova-Kulikova, Aliyeva & David, 2023;Müller & Wittner, 2023). Strategies for the recovery and revitalization of business tourism in Europe have also been studied (Carvalho, 2023).…”