Welcoming, lively, cosmopolitan, sustainable, reliable, and safe. Madrid is a leading city in the business tourism sector, and the international awards it has received only serve to reinforce this fact.
From Best MICE Destination 2020 at the World MICE Awards, to Europe’s Leading Meetings & Conference Destination 2020 and the World’s Leading Meetings & Conference Destination 2020, these accolades demonstrate that the Spanish capital has been working non-stop to secure its position in the MICE sector.
Madrid Convention Bureau (MCB) is a body that works to promote the Spanish capital as a destination for conferences, events and meetings. This year, the two cornerstones that underpin its annual roadmap are sustainability and legacy. Intrinsically linked, sustainability encompasses the fields of ecology, the environment and social settings, and legacy represents the positive footprint that these types of professional events leave on the city after they have been held. That’s why Madrid Convention Bureau has recently launched the new tool PLUS.
As well as these two strategic cornerstones, professionalism, creativity, and high standards are also key. As are the passion and dedication of the professionals of the sector, whom MCB has stayed in close contact with by means of training courses and promotional activities for its more than 200 affiliate companies. Over the past year, this invincible sector has successfully adapted and responded to guests and visitors in Madrid, and the city has continued to host in-person events and meetings.
PLUS is the new digital platform that Madrid Convention Bureau has made available for meeting planners to ensure that sustainability and legacy criteria are included in the design phase.
The PLUS platform allows effective management of sustainability in events in direct connection with the commitments established in the 17 sustainable development goals (SDG) of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda.
The tool facilitates contact between organizers and local agents for the implementation of positive social, environmental and cultural impact actions that will result in a lasting benefit for society.
MCB has invested several years in developing tools that make easier for clients to incorporate sustainability criteria into the design of meetings taking place in Madrid.
The PLUS platform is available to any meeting organizer and allows the generation of specific sustainability reports for each meeting, which contain recommendations to minimize the environmental and social impact of meetings held in Madrid. After holding a meeting, the PLUS platform can also generate a report on the calculation of the CO2 emissions produced.
What differentiates this tool from other initiatives is that the analytical report of the meeting is made before it is held, which allows corrective actions to be taken in the planning phase. This means that the tool is not so much a calculator of negative impact with compensation proposals, but rather a tool to minimize this impact and facilitate real implementation of the SDGs and the creation of a legacy strategy during the event.
PLUS is aligned with the MICE Sustainability Guide prepared in 2020 in order to provide the different sectors of activity that are part of the MCB with recommendations to incorporate the 17 UN SDG’s into their business activity and contribute, in this way, to generate a positive social impact and reduce its environmental impact.
Among the main technical specifications are:
• Registration of all the necessary documentation to include the ISO 20.121 management system on Sustainable Events.
• Database of meetings included in PLUS.
• Legacy proposals section: list of local stakeholders to develop a legacy Project with (NGOs, associations, foundations, etc.).
• Generation of statistics on the use of the platform.
• List of suppliers with services and products that have sustainable characteristics or comply with the SDGs in Madrid.
The platforms is available on demand, by contacting the Madrid Convention Bureau’s Legacy & Sustainability Department.
For more information, visit esmadrid.com/mcb/en.
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