22 January 2024
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Glasgow, Scotland has significantly bolstered its standing as a prominent international conference destination, as evidenced by the notable increase in conferences held in the city that garnered record-breaking attendance figures in 2023, building upon the momentum of the city’s busiest year for international conferences in 2022, as reported by ICCA.
Despite the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, Glasgow has proven to be a trusted and popular host city for a variety of national and international associations to welcome more delegates to their conference than ever before.
In calendar year January to December 2023, Glasgow hosted over 350 conferences, welcoming over 115,000 delegates who brought over £140m in economic benefit to the city from delegate spend.
The European Conference on Educational Research, which took place at the University of Glasgow in August, attracted 4,000 delegates, almost 60% more than they had expected, resulting in the largest gathering of Educational Researchers in Europe.
In addition to ECER 2023, the British International Studies Association (BISA) also drew record breaking delegate numbers when they held their Annual Conference at the Hilton Glasgow.
As well as 2023 being a strong year for Glasgow’s hotels and academic venues, the Scottish Event Campus, the SEC Glasgow, saw a number of conferences take place attracting their highest ever delegate numbers.
The European Society for Human Genetics (ESHG) returned to Glasgow for the 2nd time in 8 years, and it proved to be an incredibly popular choice for delegates, more popular than any other host destination in the previous 55 years. ESHG attracted almost 4800 in person registrations in total, drawn from 90 different countries, delivering more than a 20% increase on expectations.