Meetings Industry Association celebrates another successful year

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The Meetings Industry Association (mia) has seen continual growth and retention through 2019, highlighting the particular value of its role during challenging trading conditions.

Chair Kay England proudly revealed at the association’s 30th Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 11 February that mia membership had grown by 15.8% while it had retained 91% of existing members.

Kay said the results demonstrated that mia members really valued the role, insight, support and care provided by the association – including the data and economic trend analysis provided by its benchmarking tool miaTouchstone.

The success of the mia’s busy events programme was also highlighted by the Chair, which benefitted more than 1,000 delegates attending popular events such as Sales HIIT and the agent networking events.

Meanwhile, the miaList was attended by a record 273 attendees in 2019 – with 18 awards being announced to recognise what Kay described as ‘the incredible, passionate and hardworking people who make an amazing contribution to our special industry’.

Delivering his financial report, Treasurer Ivor Turner revealed income had grown 9.27% in the last year and that the association had had an excellent year in membership retention, development and growth.

He said: “The association is financially stable, is able to meet all of its commitments and is well equipped to deliver benefits and services to its members for the foreseeable future.”

Looking at the year ahead Chief Executive Jane Longhurst revealed the mia’s ambitions for 2020 are to deliver business improvement, financial and resource savings, first-class benchmarking as well as significant industry research.

As part of its 30th celebrations, Jane announced that later this year “the mia will be delivering the biggest and most exciting benefit since the launch of AIM accreditation in 2007.”

Alongside this work, Jane added that the mia is also working on further improvements to its AIM accreditation, which will see online upgrades as well as AIM Excellence replacing the existing AIM Gold rating.

Concluding the AGM was the appointment of the mia council for 2020/2021. Steve Jones of Wyboston Lakes was appointed chair and Charles Sargeant of Whittlebury Park as vice-chair while Nick Milne and Ivor Turner remain as honorary secretary and honorary treasurer respectively.

Other council members for 2020/21 include: Compass Group’s Jo Austin; 15Hatfields’ Warren Campbell; One Wimpole Street’s Nigel Collett; Park Plaza London Riverbank’s Rob Flinter; Accor’s Dawn Jaynes, Marketing Liverpool’s Jennifer Jensen; John Nugent of Green & Fortune and QEII Centre’s Mark Taylor.

Molly Hookings
Author: Molly Hookings

Molly joined the editorial team in March 2019. She has several years’ experience working in broadcast and journalism, as well as marketing and PR. Past experience includes working for the BBC and independent publishing houses. If you have a story you think Molly might be interested in, please email: molly@eventindustrynews.com