Beyond the Trade Fair: Germany as an Incentive Destination

Germany receives more MICE visitors than any other country in Europe. The vast majority of them attend conferences, congresses, and trade fairs. The Frankfurt Messe, the Messe München, the Berlin Exhibition Grounds — these are the venues that define Germany's international MICE identity, and they are extraordinary for what they do. What they do not do is produce incentive travel recall. A delegate who attends a Frankfurt trade fair has experienced Germany's conference infrastructure. He has not experienced Germany.

Germany as an Incentive Destination - The Cultural Incentive Case

Germany's cultural and landscape assets for incentive programming are, by any objective assessment, among the most varied in Europe. The Mosel valley — the river that runs southwest from Trier to Koblenz through 250 kilometres of slate-soil vineyard — contains the most dramatic vineyard landscape in the world and produces the Riesling grape at a level of quality that the international wine world has been rediscovering for twenty years. The river towns of Bernkastel-Kues, Traben-Trarbach, Cochem, and Zell function according to the rhythms of the wine agricultural year rather than the MICE calendar, which means that a corporate group visiting the Mosel in October — during the harvest — encounters a landscape in active productive use rather than a tourism infrastructure arranged for visitors. The private cellar visits at estates such as Weingut Egon Müller, Weingut Joh. Jos. Prüm, or the Bischöfliche Weingüter Trier represent access to the appellation's history through families that have been there for generations.

Dresden is the most underused cultural incentive destination in Germany. The Baroque centre — the Frauenkirche, the Zwinger, the Semperoper, the Residenzschloss with its Green Vault treasury — constitutes one of the most concentrated assemblies of seventeenth and eighteenth century court architecture in Europe, almost entirely reconstructed after the 1945 bombing and now complete. The Semperoper for a private concert evening, the Green Vault for a private reception, the Baroque court garden for the post-dinner walk: these are elements of a Dresden programme that produces the specific kind of cultural authority recall that no conference infrastructure can provide.

Bavaria Beyond Munich

Munich is Germany's most familiar corporate destination and one of its most expensive. The Bavarian landscape beyond Munich — the Alpine foothills, the Chiemsee, the Berchtesgaden valley, the Allgäu — is less expensive, less familiar, and more specifically atmospheric. The Herrenchiemsee palace on its lake island, the private hunting lodges of the Bavarian kings in the Schachen valley, the Wieskirche at Steingaden (Bavarian Rococo at its most complete), the Alpine dairy cooperatives of the Allgäu producing the Emmentaler and Bergkäse that the region has made for a thousand years — these are not conference backdrop. They are a cultural programme in their own right, and one that operates at a high level of specificity and quality for groups willing to move away from the Munich hotel district.