Rome and Milan as meeting cities: Italy holds second place in the ICCA rankings while its meeting count falls

What ICCA counts, and what it leaves out

ICCA is a membership association of convention bureaus, venues and suppliers, based in Amsterdam. Its rankings come from its association meetings database. The 2025 report says its data is drawn from member submissions and the work of an in-house research team. A city's convention bureau that reports diligently helps its own ranking. A city with few ICCA members may be undercounted until the research team finds its meetings.

The inclusion rules are short and strict. ICCA's Meeting Submission Guidelines, in the version dated July 2025, require three things. A meeting must rotate between at least three countries or territories. It must attract at least 50 participants face to face. It must be held at a fixed frequency, such as annually or every two years. A first edition counts only once the locations of its second and third editions are confirmed.

The exclusions are just as clear. Corporate meetings are out. So are trade fairs and stand-alone exhibitions, sporting events, religious and political gatherings, festivals and championships. Events run by conference-producing companies and publishers are out. Government meetings enter ICCA's database but do not count toward the association rankings. A national congress that never leaves Italy fails the rotation rule by design.

That leaves a particular kind of event. The typical ICCA meeting is small. In 2025, 60.4% of counted meetings had between 50 and 249 participants and 31.8% had between 250 and 999. Only 2.8% had 2,000 or more. Medical sciences, technology and science are the leading subjects. ICCA has venue data for only about 40% of 2025 meetings. Of those, universities hosted 36%, hotels 28% and convention and exhibition centres 27%, according to ICCA's figures as reported by MIT Magazine.

The ranking therefore rewards a country with many academic societies, many mid-sized venues and many university cities. It says little about a city's total meetings business. A city can host thousands of company meetings and still rank low. A city can rank high on the strength of a few dozen rotating scientific congresses.

ICCA also publishes less than many readers assume. Its free public extract for 2025 lists the top 20 countries and cities by rank. It gives no counts for Italy, its cities or most other countries. The counts sit in the full report, which is available to members. Every 2025 count in this article for Italy, Rome or Milan comes from trade press and convention-bureau statements, and we say so each time.

Italy: second place, a smaller count

ICCA's 2025 extract ranks the United States first, Italy second, Germany third and Spain fourth. The United Kingdom, Japan, France, Portugal, the Netherlands and China complete the top ten. Italy is first in Europe. It also ranks second in the world for science meetings, third for technology and fourth for medical sciences.

The counts behind those ranks were reported in Italian and international trade press after the release at IMEX Frankfurt on 19 May 2026. Italy had 616 meetings, Germany 565 and Spain 544. The United States had 792, a figure ICCA's extract also prints. Skift Meetings gave the 2024 figure for Italy as 635 and Italy's share of the world total as 5.72% in 2024 and 4.95% in 2025. Both shares reconcile with ICCA's 12,438 total and the implied 2024 base of 11,099 (our arithmetic).

The trend over four data years is clear. Italy had 522 meetings in 2022, when it ranked third, according to ICCA's own 2022 press document. It had 553 in 2023 and moved to second. It reached 635 in 2024, a gain of 82. It then fell by 19, or 3.0%, in 2025 (our arithmetic). In 2025 Italy was 176 meetings behind the United States (our arithmetic).

Each ICCA edition is a snapshot of a database that keeps growing as members submit records. A later edition can carry a different figure for an earlier year. The comparisons here use each year's figure as it was reported when that year's ranking came out. They are the figures convention bureaus and ministries quote.

The country ranking is also less volatile than the city ranking. Italy's meetings are spread across many cities. Bologna hosted 47 ICCA meetings in 2025, its highest count on record, and ranked 53rd in the world, according to its convention bureau. Palermo rose from 274th to 151st with 18 meetings, as reported by the Sicilian daily QdS. A national total built from many mid-sized cities holds its rank even when the capital slips.

The national body that bids for these meetings is Convention Bureau Italia, a private association of Italian venues, destinations and suppliers. It does not publish its own count of meetings. Its president, Carlotta Ferrari, said in the May 2026 coverage that the data validated a coordinated national strategy. ICCA's report credits the bureau's Italian Knowledge Leaders programme, launched in 2021, which identifies Italian academics and clinicians who sit on the boards of international associations and helps them bid for congresses.

Rome against Europe's leading meeting cities

The 2025 city ranking is led by Europe. Lisbon was first with 188 meetings, followed by Paris with 174, Barcelona with 166 and Vienna with 159, according to the counts published by Hosteltur alongside ICCA's ranks. Singapore, Prague, Copenhagen, London, Seoul and Tokyo complete the top ten. Berlin had 112 meetings, Madrid 108 and Athens 100.

Rome's 101 meetings put it level with the second tier of European capitals, well behind the leaders. Lisbon hosted almost twice as many meetings as Rome (our arithmetic). Lisbon's tourism body said its meetings drew more than 100,000 participants, as paraphrased by Skift Meetings. No comparable participant figure has been published for Rome.

The national picture differs from the city picture. Spain placed two cities in the top 20 and Germany one, yet Italy outranked both countries with a single city in the top 20. Italy's strength is depth. Bologna, Naples, Florence and Turin were all in the 2024 top 100 alongside Rome and Milan, as reported by Italpress and ItaliaOggi, and ItaliaOggi reported that Italy had 20 cities in ICCA's top 300 that year, more than any other country. Bologna ranked third in Italy, behind Rome and Milan, for the fourth consecutive year in 2025, according to its convention bureau.

That depth is also why the country rank and the city ranks can move in opposite directions. In 2025 Italy kept second place while Rome lost seven places and Milan dropped out of the top 20. A reader who sees only the national headline would miss both city results. A reader who sees only Rome's fall would miss that the country count fell by a much smaller margin.

The comparison also has limits. ICCA ranks cities by meetings held, not by participants, nights or spending. A city that hosts a few very large medical congresses can generate more delegate nights than a city with more small meetings and a higher rank.

Rome: from the top ten to 16th

Rome's ICCA record has swung widely in a decade. Pagella Politica, checking a claim by the city's then mayor in 2014, found Rome 19th in the 2013 ranking with 99 meetings. Rome was 20th in 2016 with 96, as reported by Qualitytravel.it. ICCA's own 2022 document gives Rome 79 meetings, placed 14th. Rome then climbed to 7th in 2023 with 119 meetings, as reported by Travelquotidiano, and placed 9th in 2024 with 114.

In 2025 Rome ranked 16th, just ahead of Athens. ICCA's extract confirms the rank. The count of 101 comes from the Spanish trade title Hosteltur, which published the city top 20 with counts. Rome's loss of 13 meetings is an 11.4% fall, against Italy's 3.0% (our arithmetic). Rome's share of Italy's ICCA meetings fell from about 18% in 2024 to about 16% in 2025.

Two sources link the fall to the Jubilee. The OICE report for 2025 says activity in central Italy fell partly because of the Jubilee, with fewer large international events in Rome. Claudio Carserà, chief executive of EUR SpA, which runs the La Nuvola convention centre and the Palazzo dei Congressi, described a slight dip due to the Jubilee, as reported by Qualitytravel.it on 1 June 2026. The explanation is plausible. Associations choose cities years ahead, and some may have avoided a year of crowded hotels and high rates. No one has measured it. ICCA records meetings, not the reasons a city was not chosen. Our Jubilee 2025 analysis covers how the event changed the city's visitor numbers.

Rome's own tourism pages have not caught up. The municipal Business Rome page, last modified on 7 August 2026, still describes Rome as one of the top ten cities in the world in the ICCA 2024 report. That was true of the 2024 data and is out of date for 2025. An older city page from December 2023 says congresses bring more than one million visitors to Rome each year, with 3,000 to 5,000 people per event. It attributes the figure to ICCA without naming a report or year. No ICCA document we opened contains it, and ICCA's own size profile, in which most meetings have fewer than 250 participants, does not fit 3,000 to 5,000 people per event.

EUR SpA's congress unit reported revenue of more than €21.5 million in 2025, up from €20.3 million in 2024, according to the same report. That is one company's revenue, across corporate and association events, and it rose in the year Rome's ICCA count fell. The two numbers measure different things and do not contradict each other.

Milan: a jump to 14th, then out of the top 20

Milan's record is less stable. It ranked 43rd in 2016. ICCA's 2022 document gives it 66 meetings and 18th place. It fell to 29th in 2023. In 2024 it rose to 14th with 100 meetings, its best result in the period, as reported by Italpress, ItaliaOggi and the Florence and Turin convention bureaus. Several of those reports also placed Milan third in the world for average participants per meeting in 2024. We did not find that figure in an ICCA document.

In 2025 Milan does not appear in ICCA's top 20. The cities tied at 20th, Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, had 91 meetings each, according to Hosteltur. Milan therefore had fewer than 91. The Bologna Convention Bureau says Bologna, with 47 meetings, ranked third in Italy behind Rome and Milan, so Milan had more than 47 (our inference from Hosteltur and the Bologna Convention Bureau). Skift Meetings reported that Milan lost market share. No open source we found publishes Milan's exact 2025 rank or count. Milan's city promotion agency, Milano & Partners, publishes no ICCA figure on its site, and Assolombarda's February 2026 benchmark of Milan lists the ICCA ranking among its 33 sources without a Milan number.

The swing from 29th to 14th to outside the top 20 in three years shows how sensitive city ranks are near the top. In 2025 only 28 meetings separated 10th place (Tokyo, 119) from 20th (91), on Hosteltur's counts. A few rotating congresses won or lost can move a city several places. Milan's biggest event of early 2026, the Winter Games covered in our Milano Cortina analysis, would not count at all, because ICCA excludes sporting events.

Milan's main meetings business is corporate. It is Italy's financial and trade-fair centre, and its fairs and company conventions sit outside ICCA's rules. Malpensa, Linate and Bergamo carried 59.5 million airport passengers in 2025 (our sum of the airport association Assaeroporti's figures), and none of that traffic is attributed to meetings by any published source.

The corporate market ICCA does not see

The broadest Italian series is the OICE, the Osservatorio Italiano dei Congressi e degli Eventi. It is promoted by Federcongressi&eventi, the meetings industry association, and run by ASERI, the graduate school of economics at the Università Cattolica in Milan. It defines an event as a meeting held in person or in hybrid form, lasting at least four hours, with at least ten participants. It includes association congresses, company conventions, product launches and other meetings. It excludes exhibitions and private events such as weddings.

For 2025 the OICE counted 365,789 events, down 0.6%. They drew 28,627,455 participants, down 2.2%, or 78.3 per event. Participants generated 43,275,254 presences, down 8.3%. Companies promoted 61.4% of events, associations 24.4% and public institutions 14.2%. International events were 12.9% of the total, and international participants 14.7%. More than half of all events, 54.8%, drew a local audience.

The OICE is a survey, not a census. Its 2025 questionnaire went to 5,502 venues between January and April 2026. 753 replied, a response rate of 13.7%. The results are weighted by area, venue type and capacity, with a stated maximum error of 7.5% at a 95% confidence level. Hotels with meeting rooms hosted 76.6% of events, as reported by Qualitytravel.it from the presentation.

The OICE publishes no figure for Rome or Milan. It reports venues by region: Lombardy had 878 venues in the survey universe and Lazio 574. Its text names Rome and Florence as the big cities where activity contracted in 2025. ICCA's 616 meetings and the OICE's 365,789 events are not one series at two sizes. ICCA's meetings are mostly in universities and conference centres, and the OICE surveys venues. Some ICCA meetings will sit inside the OICE count and some will not.

Business travel spending fell

The Bank of Italy's survey of international tourism adds a money measure. Its 2025 results, published on 26 June 2026, split foreign travellers' spending by purpose. Travellers who came for work and business spent €6,302 million in 2025, down 20.3% from €7,911 million in 2024. Their number fell from 15.0 million to 11.7 million and their nights from 45.0 million to 42.2 million. Personal trips rose 8.9% to €50,422 million. The Bank states that all of 2025's growth in tourism receipts came from personal trips.

Business travel's share of foreign spending fell from 14.6% to 11.1% (our arithmetic). The Bank's survey has no separate line for congresses or trade fairs and no city split. It cannot say how much of the fall came from meetings and how much from other work trips. Our tourism receipts analysis sets the business line against the full balance of payments.

ISTAT measures the other direction, trips made by Italian residents. Its last headline report on travel, for 2023, counted 4.108 million business trips by residents, against 7.788 million in 2019. Business meetings and trips for congresses, conventions and seminars were the most frequent reasons, at 17.8% of business trips. Lombardy, Lazio and Tuscany together hosted almost 42% of domestic business trips. ISTAT gives no city figure and has published no headline report for a later year.

Which number to cite

Two economic values for the sector circulate, and neither can be checked. In May 2026 ENIT's president, Alessandra Priante, cited nearly €15 billion in direct economic impact from business and congress tourism, as reported by Qualitytravel.it and IMEX. No method or document accompanies the figure. The OICE summary says the sector grew 6.4% a year from 2022 to 2025, "generando 13,2 miliardi di euro". It does not say whether that sum is annual or cumulative, or how it was estimated. ICCA's free material estimates delegate spending worldwide, with no figure for Italy.

The counts are safer than the values. ICCA's ranks are published by ICCA. The counts for Italy are consistent across Skift, Missionline, Qualitytravel.it and the convention bureaus, and Skift's market shares reconcile with ICCA's 12,438 total. The OICE and Bank of Italy figures come from their own documents. What none of them gives is a measure of how many people came to Rome or Milan for meetings, how long they stayed or what they spent. Our analysis of tourism concentration in four cities shows how much of Italy's visitor demand Rome and Milan already absorb.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers visiting Rome or Milan will rarely notice an ICCA congress. Most counted meetings have fewer than 250 participants, and Rome hosted about two a week in 2025 on the press-reported count. The large fairs and corporate conventions that fill business hotels are a different market and do not appear in the rankings. In Milan, fair weeks are the dates to check before booking, and our Milan travel guide covers when to go. Rome's meeting calendar matters less to hotel prices than its religious and holiday calendar. The Rome travel guide covers neighbourhoods and timing.

Tourism businesses and investors should read the ICCA rank as a measure of association bidding success. It does not measure a city's total meetings demand. Italy's ICCA count fell 3.0% in a year when the world's rose about 12%. Rome's fell 11.4%. Foreign business spending, which covers all work trips, fell 20.3% on the Bank of Italy's survey. Each series measures something different, and none of the three rose. A venue or hotel plan built on Italy's second-place ranking alone would miss that. The corporate market is larger, measured only by a venue survey with a 13.7% response rate and no city detail. A return of Rome to the top ten in the 2026 data, or a published Milan count, would change the reading for those two cities.

Journalists and analysts can cite the figures in the box above with their scope, naming the series and year each time. Rome's 101 and Milan's 2024 count of 100 should carry the words press-reported. Do not describe ICCA's count as Italy's congress market. Do not repeat Rome's top-ten status for 2025. Do not cite "nearly €15 billion" or €13.2 billion as measured annual impact. Do not attribute Rome's fall to the Jubilee as fact. The series finding is that Italy's best-known meetings statistic is a rank built from member submissions, while the larger corporate market has no official count by city.