Where the Future Begins
The ancient Adriatic seaside tourism destination of Rimini is poised to open Italy’s largest conference center in early 2010.
By Rowland Stiteler
GEOGRAPHY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A GOOD FRIEND OF RIMINI. Originally settled as an Adriatic seaside fishing village, the city has grown and flourished over the centuries in part by being located at the crossroads of two important Roman consular roads, the Via Emilia and the Via Flaminia.
“It’s safe to assume there were meetings here even in the ancient times,” said Annalisa Giannini, sales manager for the Convention Bureau della Riviera di Rimini (CBRR), which markets to conferences in this emerging city of 140,000 residents, one of Italy’s more popular summer destinations for leisure travelers.
Even now, at least a millennium after Rimini became a crossroads, its strategic location proves to be one of its more compelling attraction factors for conferences.
“It’s a factor that it’s convenient to the most important Italian cities—Bologna, Florence, Rome, Venice—because we want our international attendees to get a chance to see Italy, and that becomes easy to accomplish from Rimini,” said Fabio Fava, Ph.D., professor of Industrial and Environmental Biotechnology at the University of Bologna, and also chair of the 14th International Biotechnology Symposium and Exhibition (to be held in Rimini in September 2010), considered one of the main worldwide events on biotechnology for human sustainability.
And while Rimini has been at a literal strategic crossroads for centuries, it now has placed itself at a figurative strategic crossroads as well, seeking to move up the rankings among European conference destinations with the construction of what will be Italy’s largest conference centre, the Palacongressi di Rimini, featuring more than 28,000 square metres of usable event space, a main hall that seats 4,700 and an amphitheatre that seats 1,600.
When the new conference centre opens in early 2010, it will be an architectural statement designed by Volkwin Marg of Studio GMP in Hamburg, Germany, who also designed the Rimini Expo Centre, which opened in 2001. The new Palacongressi di Rimini will also make something of an environmental statement as well, incorporating all the latest in green-building technology, such as a rainwater recirculation system and a cooling system that involves freezing water at night and using the ice for refrigeration and cooling during the day. And centre will utilize the latest in green operating practices as well, ranging from recycling waste to composting food waste from the kitchen facilities.
“That’s one of the great things about building a new conference centre from the ground up,” Giannini said. “The Palacongressi reflects all the best of the collective strategic thinking of the conference industry in Rimini as it has evolved and developed in recent years.”
She says Rimini’s conference industry, which last year accounted for about 6,800 events that collectively attracted more than 1.1 million participants, does in fact trace its beginning from bygone centuries.
“Clearly there were visitors to Rimini going back for centuries, but it became a popular and well known beach resort with most Europeans going back to the 19th century,” Giannini said.
As a result of Rimini being such a popular beach destination for such a long time, the Rimini area has developed a sizeable and sophisticated hotel community, she adds.
“The Province of Rimini [the geo-political area in which the city of Rimini is located] has about 70,000 hotel rooms, with more than 400 three-, four- and five-star hotels, open year round so our hotel room availability is among the best in Europe,” Giannini said.
The modern conference industry in Rimini got started in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she says, when association meetings began to come to the city because it was such a popular place among attendees, who liked to bring their families to enjoy leisure travel amenities. And the tourism industry in the Rimini area began to capitalize on the huge hotel room inventory to turn the destination into a popular place for trade fairs and exhibitions, with the first combination exhibition centre and conference centre in the early 1980s.
A strong flow of association meeting and trade show delegates to Rimini made it possible to attract investors to finance the building of more tourism infrastructure, and it also led to the creation of public-private consortiums to not only promote the convention and trade show industry in Rimini, but to manage it and formulate high standards of service among the many vendors needed to make the industry flourish.
One of the key organisations to result from that industry evolution in Rimini over the past two decades was the convention bureau itself, the CBRR, which, when it opened in 1994, was actually the first city convention bureau in Italy.
“CVBs are a relatively recent occurrence in Europe as compared to North America,” Giannini said. “So we were in the vanguard of the movement in Italy when we began operating 15 years ago.”
European destinations have had tourism bureaus and tourism ministries for decades, she explains, but not official bureaus to promote and facilitate conventions, meetings and trade shows.
One of the more important strategic moves by the CBRR was the creation of Rimini per i Congressi, Italy’s first local organisation for standards certification of all the suppliers needed to make a convention industry run smoothly. The function of Rimini per i Congressi is to ensure standards and best practices among Rimini industry suppliers that meet the highest standards in Europe, a move designed to make Rimini not just attractive to regional and Italian groups, but to groups from around the world.
The CBRR has also organised a permanent local housing task force for conferences and trade shows, which includes the local chamber of commerce, trade show organisations and the municipality of Rimini. In 2007, the CBRR created the Ambassadors Club, a group of 114 members who promote within their own industries, seeking to bring conferences and trade shows to Rimini. The CBRR also has formed a partnership with the nearby city of Riccione, which itself opened a new convention centre in 2008.
Not to be understated, Giannini says, is the importance of the opening 15 years ago of a Rimini branch of the University of Bologna, one of Italy’s premier higher-learning institutions, with the Rimini campus offering degrees in economic development and tourism marketing.
With the coming of the University of Bologna to Rimini, the tourism marketing and management community became more sophisticated and cohesive.
But perhaps the biggest impetus to move forward with the new convention centre was the opening in 2001 of the new Rimini Expo Centre, which offers 169,000 square metres of usable exhibit space in 16 halls.
“With the opening of the new expo centre, the community began to seek to move forward with a new convention centre, so we can have a state-of-the art facility that will attract international conferences—to this point, our clientele has been largely from within Italy,” Giannini said.
That goal is starting to become a reality as the new Palacongressi nears its grand opening. Already booked are the International Congress of the Bureau du Tourism Social in 2010 and the World Leisure Congress in 2012, two important international events within the tourism industry, and the International Biotechnology Symposium and Exhibition in 2010, which will bring both academic professionals and private industry professionals from the biotechnology industry around the world.
Professor Fava is familiar with Rimini from attending various trade shows there, such as the Ecomondo International Trade Fair on Material and Energy Recovery and Sustainable Development (he is a member of the organisation’s advisory board) and recommended Rimini to the Biotechnology Symposium.
He says the city is an emerging destination in the conference industry, with more reasonable room rates that one can find in most other European cities large enough to host the conference, which is expected to attract about 1,500 delegates from around the world.
And of course, the new Palacongressi counted a lot in the decision to bring the Biotechnology Symposium to Rimini.
Among the more important components at the event will be the presentation of research papers by academics in the biotechnology field, the presentation of exhibits by industries and manufacturers of biotechnology hardware and software and the interaction of the academic and industry professionals to form consortiums and partnerships for further studies. The Palacongressi is well suited for all of those functions, Fava says.
Fava has become quite familiar with the design and construction progress of the new convention centre, and is quite comfortable with the Palacongressi as his choice.
“It’s quite a flexible building that can be configured exactly to our requirements, and of course it’s a green building as well, which will certainly will be appealing to our attendees.”
Giannini says the new center was designed with flexibility and state-of the art technology as priorities, with the ability to create up to 42 modular spaces to the specifications of any event.
The convention centre, which has been built on land as part of a greenway that connects the famous Arco d’ Augusto—the oldest surviving archway from the Roman Empire—with the Adriatic beachfront, is part of the multiyear, €350 million capital improvement program designed to take the city of Rimini forward into the 21st century, in keeping with the CBRR’s marketing slogan: “Here the future has already begun, but the soul of the Rimini Riviera stays the same.” One+EMEA
ROWLAND STITELER is an experienced meeting and event industry journalist.
Transportation Tip
Rimini’s Federico Fellini International Airport has direct service to European cities such as London and Paris, but no direct trans-oceanic service to North and South America. Veteran meeting planners recommend using larger airports such as Guglielmo Marconi Airport International in Bologna, which has more international flights and is about a 45-minuite commuter rail ride from Rimini.
What’s New in Rimini
• The opening of the new Rimini Palacongressi convention center, which is set to open its doors by the end of the year, is part of a massive, €350 million capital improvement program that will add a wide array of new infrastructure to the Rimini area.
• The neighboring beach community of Riccione opened its new Palazzo dei Congressi, with room for 2,400 delegates and a terrace overlooking the Adriatic Sea, in May 2008.
• The Rimini Riviera Metro, a light rail transit system that will link Rimini and Riccione, is scheduled to open in 2013.
Fun Fact
• The Arch of Augustus, just inside the ramparts of the original Roman city of Rimini, is one of the city’s most famous architectural monuments, not just because of its ornate stone carvings, but because of its age. First constructed in 27 B.C., it is the oldest known archway still remaining in Italy from the days of the Roman Empire.