MICE

MICE Travel ( Meetings, Incentives, Conferences & Events) is a popular travel segment in Scandinavia with many hotels and service providers specializing in it. However, specializing in the MICE market especially if you’re a hotel can lead to image problems with the leisure market who seldom like to share the same space as large and sometimes noisy corporate groups. With a more focused product development and branding strategy conflict can be avoided, especially if you’re pitching for small-scale, high value meetings, incentives and corporate team building events.

I recently gave a seminar in Trøndheim sponsored by Wild Norway and Trøndelag reiseliv where Chris Doyle of the ATTA (Adventure Travel Trade Association) and I pushed the case for more and higher quality adventure travel in the region. Part of my talk was dedicated to thinking outside of the box for attracting the MICE segment. To illustrate this I gave examples from global destinations on how adventure travel and the MICE segment can create win-win situations through improved linkage between urban properties and outdoor service providers.

Of the two examples I highlighted one was from Portland, Oregon where there was a campaign to promote the hip side of Portland with the outdoor opportunities for MICE groups through using the ‘best of both world’s’ tag.

The second example was from Whistler in BC where they try to attract MICE groups to Whistler by promoting the benefits of the incredible outdoors and mountains that surround the destination through the ‘Your Group Our Mountain’ campaign.

My feelings are that much of northern Scandinavia is missing the boat in this niche of the MICE market. There are MICE inbound specialists in Iceland that already focus on this niche but I feel destinations such as Trøndheim, Molde, Ålesund, Røros, Trømso, Lofoten, Åre, Funasdalen, Kiruna, Jokkmokk (to name a few) could still do much more to sell themselves as an outdoor focused MICE destination in order to try to tap into ‘new’ business.

Three companies in Norway that already do an outstanding job at delivering ‘cool’ outdoor experiences for the MICE market are DID Adventure ( the site is only in Norwegian but Didrick speaks excellent English) based out of Molde, 62 Degrees North out of Ålesund and XXLofoten. Both DID Adventures and XXLofoten are owned and operated by people who truly understand the outdoors and how to operate in it which I feel is a critical factor.

There are more and more specialist MICE travel arrangers out there looking for unique angles to pitch to their clients and I feel that the ease of access, wide range of outdoor activities and high levels of quality and safety can give northern Scandinavia and the Vestnorden region a distinct advantage if more visibility can be achieved.