According to the latest figures published by the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA), the secondary destinations in its annual ranking are boosted by the fact that medium-sized congresses and conferences account for 53% of the 11,000 events listed by the association. Today, only 8% of congresses attract more than 1,000 delegates. Another interesting statistic provided by the ICCA is that medical conferences and congresses are the most active, accounting for 17% of all events. This is followed by technology with 14%, science with 13%, and finally education and industry, with 6% each.
Luxembourg is home to the headquarters of a large number of European institutions, international banks, law firms and companies active in finance, technology and logistics. As a result, the country attracts a large number of international companies (particularly in finance, tech and law), generating a constant demand for top-of-the-range meeting rooms in hotels, conference centres or modern coworking spaces. High-end hotels in the grand duchy include the Sofitel Luxembourg Europe and the Hôtel Royal, which offer modular meeting rooms. Added to this are modern coworking centres such as The Office or Silversquare, which offer dynamic and flexible settings that are popular with startups and international consultants.
37 venues in Luxembourg City, 82 in the country
According to the latest figures from the Luxembourg Convention Bureau, 37% of business events organised in the country in 2024 were for meetings, a figure down 11 percentage points compared to the year before. A total of 82 venues were listed in the grand duchy in 2024, including 37 in Luxembourg City alone. The other 45 venues are divided between the Éislek region (nine venues), the Guttland region (seven venues), the Mullerthal region (seven venues), the Moselle region (twelve venues) and the Minette region (ten venues). These include the châteaux of Urspelt and Vianden in the Éislek, the new hybrid and immersive Gridx complex at Wickrange (15 meeting rooms ranging from 20 to 1,400 square metres) and Casino 2000 at Mondorf-les-Bains (five meeting rooms with a maximum capacity of 1,275 square metres).
In Luxembourg’s capital city, there are a number of heavyweights in the events sector: Luxexpo The Box (30 meeting rooms, the largest of which is 6,400 square metres), the European Convention Center Luxembourg (14 meeting rooms, the largest of which is 800 square metres) and Neimënster Abbey (which counts 15 meeting rooms). “We are positioned on each letter of the word Mice. Of course, in terms of weight, the meeting section will be lighter than large-scale events such as Nexus 2050 or the ING Night Marathon, so the critical mass is obviously lower,” says , CEO of Luxexpo The Box. The venue hosts more than 100 events a year, welcoming between 450,000 and 500,000 people over a combined surface area of more than 30,000 square metres.
“Business Events 2030”
And whilst the sector still uses the acronym “Mice,” it is under the name “Business Events” that the government wants to position itself. “ is not a break with the past, but a strong strategic repositioning within the existing roadmap for business events in Luxembourg. For several years now, we have been laying the foundations: the creation of the Luxembourg Convention Bureau, the structuring of the ecosystem, the first successes on an international scale. Now, it’s time to move up a gear. This repositioning, structured around ‘Business Events 2030,’ will enable us to clarify our ambition: to make Luxembourg a benchmark destination for innovative, sustainable and high-content business events. It means adapting our positioning to the new expectations of organisers, boosting our international profile, and making better use of our strengths such as accessibility, sectoral excellence, the living environment and the human approach,” minister delegate for tourism (DP) confirmed to Paperjam.
Created five years ago, the LCB’s initial missions were to unite the players, structure the national offering and establish a presence on the markets. “But it became clear that we needed to move on to a new stage, with a clearer, more assertive identity, more in line with international standards in the Mice sector. The tagline ‘Meet. Connect. Accelerate’ sums up our DNA: Luxembourg is a meeting place for ideas and people, an environment conducive to quality connections, and an accelerator for projects and exchanges. This change of identity reflects a desire to better embody our added value, both in terms of content and form.”
Incentives on the rise
The “I” in Mice stands for “incentives,” which are trips organised to reward employees or motivate sales teams. Although small, Luxembourg offers a wide range of cultural, gastronomic and outdoor activities (such as visits to castles, wine tasting or nature walks) that are ideal for tailor-made incentive programmes, often combined with the proximity of neighbouring countries (France, Germany, Belgium). This sector accounted for 14% of business events in 2024, an increase of 6%.
From wine tasting in the Moselle region to hiking in the Oesling nature park or private visits to medieval castles and contemporary art galleries, there’s no shortage of activities. The country is also renowned for its gastronomy, with several Michelin-starred restaurants showcasing local produce and culinary diversity. Luxexpo The Box is also active in the “incentive” sector. “This includes end-of-year celebrations, staff parties and so on,” explains Gromy. “These are often events that are much more discreet because they are private events. If you look at our agenda, it says ‘private event.’”
180 organisers supported by the LCB
In 2023, the Luxembourg Convention Bureau–which works with a team of seven people–supported around 180 organisers, a figure that was up compared to previous years. “We can clearly see that awareness of Luxembourg as a destination for professional events is growing, as is interest in our approach. What’s also notable is that the requests we receive are increasingly qualified: organisers come to us because they are looking for a stable, multilingual environment, and above all one that is aligned with their values in terms of innovation or sustainability,” adds Thill.
The LCB has four main missions: to promote Luxembourg as a destination for business events; to provide free support to organisers, whether national or international; to put local players–hotels, event venues, institutions or agencies–in touch with each other; and finally to structure the national ecosystem in order to guarantee a coherent, high-quality and sustainable offering.
A harmonisation of sectors
“The conference and congress sector involves very large capacity events on the one hand, and, for some time now, smaller capacities of up to 200-300 people with the Sigma room [equipped with a semi-panoramic 12k curved screen, measuring 22.5 metres long and 3.5 metres high, the Sigma room covers an area of 500 square metres and can accommodate up to 250 seats, editor’s note],” adds Luxexpo The Box’s CEO Gromy. “The ‘E ‘ of Mice, which stands for ‘exhibitions’, represents the largest part of our turnover. It’s also where we have the largest critical mass, because these events can be organised over several days–I’m thinking of Nexus 2050, for example, or B2B or B2C events.”
Whilst these letters still have a meaning and provide a clear structure and definition to the outside world, “it is clear that today, and especially since the pandemic, there is a form of harmonisation of the entire Mice sector. The segmentation between each letter is less and less clear-cut,” adds the Gromy. “Even in ‘incentives,’ you can have a conference part and an exhibition part. When you’re looking for ROI, a return on impact, you’re going to look for relays or support in different Mice sectors to increase the value for the people who are going to experience it. Our mission is to offer a memorable experience.”
So how do you quantify the success of an event? “Its weight will be very relative. It can be measured in terms of duration, number of visitors, exhibitors, sponsors, the real impact of the event, and so on. It’s not about the fact that it lasted three days and attracted X thousands of people, but rather what kind of mark does it leave? Nowadays, we work more with our customers on the basis of product management and the lifespan of the event. A project that is going to last two days absolutely has to generate impact months beforehand, but also months afterwards. We have new technologies, AI, but also geopolitical conflicts, environmental issues, socio-cultural changes and so on. All of this creates injunctions that mean we can’t sum up the event in terms of: ‘It lasted three days, it was cool.’ You have to think globally.”
A “complex” occupation
Gromy, who has more than 30 years’ experience in Luxembourg, France and Spain, holding strategic positions within B2C, B2B, private, institutional and associative companies, joined Luxexpo The Box in 2003 as exhibition manager. He was promoted to head of operations in 2005, then chief operating officer in 2008 and finally CEO on 1 January 2018. For this Frenchman, the job has “changed enormously in recent years, because the notion of impact, in terms of selling, transferring knowledge, attracting skills and so on, is now vital. If the organiser doesn’t take them into account, it’s a failure.”
Since the end of the pandemic, there has been an explosion in meetings, face-to-face exchanges and real-life experience.
“Since the end of the pandemic, there has been an explosion in meetings, face-to-face exchanges and real-life experience. We need to explain to staff, customers and people, so we need to meet up, and we can’t start from a distance. We really are architects of the encounter. We need to understand our customers, not just their budget, but also their objectives, their strategic culture, what they want, where they’re at, etc. And we see that our customers are also very different. And we can see that our customers are also going through a period of transformation. They have to explain how they fit into a world that is changing, their industry, their economy, their universe. And this is having an impact on our own strategy and organisation, and we have restructured our business lines to differentiate them clearly.”
Today, Luxexpo The Box counts on a team of 38 people whose primary business is organising events. “Historically, we’ve been known for this, but in the end we only organise four or five events of our own each year. Our second business–which is very important, is being developed and will accelerate–is that of co-organiser. Our third business is supplying products and services. In this third pillar, we also have the whole notion of creating concepts, including urban planning concerts and architectural concepts. In our process, we don’t have a project manager, but rather product managers. As soon as the project is a bit heavy, we manage it as a product.”
“For a long time, 80% of our business was to be the sole organisers of an event. But today, our first two business lines–in which Luxexpo The Box fully or partially assumes the risks–represent 40% of our total revenue (split 60% for our own events and 40% through co-production). The portion related to the rental of spaces and services, where we manage risks on behalf of our clients, represents 60%. Revenue from our three business lines stood at €7m, in line with the previous year, out of a total of €10.5m in total revenue–including other revenues not related to our core business.”
We’ve gone from extremely general events to hyper-specialisation.
“The themes have become much more specialised, and all of them have become more powerful. We’ve gone from extremely general events to hyper-specialisation. Our salespeople are no longer salespeople, but key sector managers, so they have economic sectors to manage. Today, communities come to events, like Japan Manga Wave. Large mass events that were a bit generalist have multiplied into smaller events that have become more thematic, more specialised.”
Luxexpo The Box’s Phoenix project
“Our work is currently based on a major transformation project called the Phoenix project, and we’re in the middle of thinking about product development and invention. The first stage was mission 25, which we started and thought about during covid-19, but which actually started in 2022. We thought about changing our values and pillars, and in 2024, we achieved B-Corp certification, a prestigious accolade that underlines the company’s deep commitment to sustainable, ethical and socially responsible practices,” continues Gromy. “We are now on Momentum 30, which means that until 2030, our objective is to consolidate, to use the resources that have been deployed and to take them forward, whilst at the same time consolidating our businesses. Innovating, inventing, developing support and event engineering, finding the best associations, the best partners, the best performers. For example, we are going to commit to creating a number of events, as we did before. So that’s why I’m thinking about cross-functionality and the importance of knowing the area.”
“We also have a project to think about an event that could be international and that we would move and go outside our walls. The aim is to promote the destination, develop our activity and visibility, and free ourselves from a particular location,” confides the CEO of Luxexpo The Box, who is certainly not short of ideas. In short, if the region were to develop its own mobile event, it would promote a form of expertise in other economic centres.
Projects are alive and constantly evolving.
Gromy also confirms that Luxexpo The Box has definitively turned the page on covid. “In the last quarter of the year, we were up 42% on the previous quarter. I had a premonition that a new normal would set in around 2025, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing. But it’s not the normality of before. These are new paradigms. We need to understand what is happening elsewhere and integrate it into an agile mode, a new model that requires project management, resource management and financial management.”
Today, Gromy sees his job as “complex. And we need to be aware of the subtleties between complicated and complex. Our business isn’t complicated, it’s complex. We have economic, social and political contingencies. They don’t evolve at the same speed, they don’t come at the same time, but they disrupt the system, the organisation, the projects. So projects are alive and constantly evolving.”
Upgrading skills
For several years now, the government has had the same ambition: that of reaching the top 50 of the ICCA ranking. Each year, the association establishes the list of the best countries and congress destinations for the previous year. In 2024, Luxembourg reached 60th place, “but the objective of being in the Top 50 by 2030 remains entirely valid,” says Thill. “We know that this ranking, which only takes into account a specific category of international events, is not the only measure of impact, but it remains a global benchmark in the sector. We were 69th in 2023, we placed 60th in 2024 and we want to continue this progression. To achieve this, we are acting on a number of levers: support for bids, development of new large-scale events such as Healthcare Week, skills development via the ICCA Skills training centre right here in Luxembourg, and the setting up of a national observatory for business events, which will enable us to measure our progress more accurately.”
Putting himself in the position of observer, Gromy says that he’s “less attached to this ranking. It may be the KPI [key performance indicator] that the government has set itself because it can be shared collectively. But for me, whether you’re ranked 54th or 69th is a completely contingent thing. In short, I don’t expect this ranking every year, it’s not our triple A. And I don’t know whether it’s the quality that makes the ranking or the relevance. After that, of course, it remains an asset for the LCB, for example, which has a more macroeconomic view, to position the country on the map of business events.”
Events for 100 to 800 participants
What types of events is Luxembourg prioritising? “We have made the strategic choice to target events with strong content, in line with the country’s strengths. This applies in particular to areas such as sustainable finance, life sciences, cybersecurity, space technologies and, more broadly, innovation and research,” explains minister Thill. “We generally host events with between 100 and 800 participants, which is in line with our capacity and our positioning as a destination on a human scale. These are often conferences, seminars and corporate events, where the quality of the exchange takes precedence over the quantity.”
Business tourism is not marginal; it is central to our strategy of economic diversification.
“What also attracts them is our setting: an accessible, multilingual, modern country where everything is within easy reach, including nature and culture. It’s a coherent whole that is increasingly appealing to international organisers.” The latest available data shows that a participant in a professional event spends an average of €450 per day. “This is a significant figure, which reflects the quality of the services consumed: accommodation, catering, mobility, ancillary activities. It’s also an indicator of the significant economic impact of the Mice sector for our country. Business tourism is not marginal; it is central to our strategy of economic diversification. It supports the hotel and restaurant trade, service providers and also Luxembourg’s international image.”
This article was written for the issue of Paperjam magazine, published on 12 June. The content is produced exclusively for the magazine. It is published on the site to contribute to the full Paperjam archive. .
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