Business Events Sydney (BESydney) is the specialist bidding services organisation responsible for attracting global meetings to Sydney. An independent organisation financially supported by the New South Wales (NSW) Government and the private sector, and backed by industry and academia, BESydney wins global meetings for Australia. BESydney works with leaders from industry, academia, research sectors and all levels of government who are focused on drawing the world’s brightest minds to Australia’s gateway city to help change the world. 

Global meetings create opportunities to profile Australia’s expertise, share knowledge, and create and strengthen international collaboration. They are valuable forums that foster trade and investment, global talent transfer, spark innovation and fuel productivity.

The BESydney team works across Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas to meet the unique and strategic needs of their clients, focusing on attracting three types of global meetings in order to generate direct expenditure into Sydney and Australia’s tourism economy and long-term impacts across the broader economy.

A strong global meetings program – comprising the many conferences, congresses, symposia and incentive programs that global destinations bid competitively to host – strengthens Sydney’s standing as a global city.

Despite the known, far-reaching and long-term impact of global meetings, their value to a host city and country was traditionally only measured in terms of “tourism dollars” – the immediately visible expenditure of a business tourist staying in a hotel, eating at restaurants and site-seeing during their visit. And while the economic contribution of tourism to the host destination is certainly significant, it presents an extremely narrow view of the broader legacy impacts on a whole field of study or industry sector including global innovation, education, networking, trade, research and academic practice.

Measuring the true impact of global meetings has become possible as a result of nine years of collaborative research, thought-leadership and direction funded by BESydney in collaboration with University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Today, global meetings’ representatives and politicians around the world are talking the “beyond tourism benefits” language (developed by the collaboration) as they work to bring conferences to their cities and countries that are aligned with key industry sectors, connected with universities, industries and global talent, cutting-edge knowledge and technology, and as sources of new investment streams.

The success of this drive has been so strong that the leader of BESydney’s home state of NSW is an active supporter of the business and the outcomes it drives.

“We must never underestimate the value of business events. They drive trade and investment, enrich our knowledge economy, and bring global experts and innovators to our shores to connect and do business” – The Hon. Gladys Berejiklian MP, Premier of New South Wales.

The research clearly supports the observations that global meetings leave legacies with important and far-reaching outcomes for smart and thriving economies. Importantly BESydney has used the research to recast their business strategy, secure funding, competitively bid for conferences, and make submissions to government. In fact, the research has attracted 200+ media citations including ABC Radio National, Best Practice: The Conference Legacy https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/this-working-life/03-02-18/9384106

The research collaboration between BESydney and UTS has catalysed an industry that supports every other industry along with growing knowledge economies. Conference organisers, venues and bureaux have a whole new understanding of the real legacies they should be leveraging. The insights gained from the Beyond Tourism Benefit series inform a new business model that underpins their true value and helps the industry to design for long-term legacies, as well as accelerate the power of meetings as transformative social network spaces.