New industry bodies set up in Australia

The MEMC is the Meeting and Event Management Consultancies Association of Australia, with 12 members in Queensland and currently recruiting members nationwide. The inaugural President is Ray Shaw of Eventplanners Australia and he stresses the association is not operating as opposition to MEA, Meetings & Events Australia, the industry's peak professional body. Indeed it started out as a special interest group of MEA. "MEMC membership is available to bona fide meeting and event management companies, not individuals. The companies must be represented by the owner or CEO," says Shaw. Benchmarking for the industry is one of the key objectives. An example of this is research by MEMC among its members has revealed that for a 300 delegate conference the time taken to process each delegate ranges from 2.75 and 3.25 hours, immensely useful information for meeting managers when allocating resources and costing an event. Another relative newcomer to the CEI market is the Australian Conference and Events Bureau (ACEB), a strategic alliance of some of the leading companies in the events, conference, meetings, exhibition and incentive industries. The alliance has industry partners in all Australian States, New Zealand and Fiji. Various services that are offered include a link between the consumer of event services and a wide range of suppliers, the securing of venues, familiarisation programmes and a one-stop shop for resources. The founder, meeting manager Peter Sugg says it can as assemble a team to meet specific event requirements, act as managers, suppliers or consultants, or provide help from one of the partner companies. ACEB has nearly 300 hotels listed on its venue search. "We have 50 partners, top players in their markets and have a network that's really working," says Sugg.