Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions (MICE)

While often grouped together, each letter is a particular form of travel that has different operational needs:

• M — Meetings: Smaller, corporate-based meetings. Consider an organization that has 50 regional managers, who are scheduled to spend three days in a Dallas hotel, to plan its strategies.
• I — Incentives: The group outlier. They are simply reward vacations that are all-expenses-paid and financed by a corporation to encourage employees or partners (such as taking the top 100 software salespeople to a luxury hotel in Hawaii).
• C — Conferences: Educational and networking conferences, frequently sponsored by industry associations or huge companies (e.g., a huge medical association occupying a thousand hotel rooms in Chicago).
• E — Exhibitions: Large, business-oriented exhibitions in which companies establish booths to display products to consumers (e.g., the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas). These need huge convention centers as opposed to hotel ballrooms.

Hotels and airlines are aggressively targeting MICE business since it is the most lucrative section of travel.

When a hotel makes a sale of a room to a family via Expedia, they only earn the room rate. When a hotel makes a booking of a MICE group, they will have guaranteed revenue of hundreds of rooms at a time (the Room Block), as well as colossal ancillary revenue of:

• F&B (Food and Beverage): Corporate lunch catering, gala dinners, and infamously high-cost coffee breaks.
• A/V (Audio/Visual): Leasing out projectors, microphones, and staging tools.
• Event Space: Ballroom and breakout room daily rent.

You cannot reserve a 1,000-person meeting on any regular OTA such as Booking.com. MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions) is based on an entirely different technology stack and procurement process.

• RFP (Request for Proposal): A corporate event planner submits an electronic RFP to 20 hotels at the same time, specifying their requirements (We need 500 beds, a 10,000 sq ft ballroom, and vegan catering).
• Bidding War: Hotel salesmen apply their own CRM systems to calculate the potential profit of the event and bid against one another to secure the contract.
• Room Block Management: The hotel has a Property Management System (PMS) that, once contracted, isolates the 500 rooms so that the attendees cannot publicly purchase any of the hotel’s rooms, and instead they have a special booking link where they can claim a particular room in the block.