Adelaide Ready to Host Business Events in the Post COVID

Adelaide is buzzing this week as it hosts 2500 business delegates (mainly from interstate) for the Australian Water Association’s Ozwater’21 annual national business event.

The event is the first major truly national business event to be held in Australia since early 2020, and comes as a result of the Adelaide Convention Bureau’s (ACB) national-best 85 per cent success rate in having its booked business events postpone from 2020, rather than cancel.

Plus, as a result of a new ACB business event volume-bidding strategy sanctioned by the Marshall State Government, more events of this high calibre interstate delegate focus are on the horizon as wins for Adelaide.

This new bidding strategy takes into consideration that a business delegate spends more than $600 a day while in Adelaide while a tourist spends less than $200. Other events which had already been secured for Adelaide this year by ACB include:

• National Architecture Symposium – August, 2021 – 1000 delegates;
• International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage Congress May, 2022 – 800 delegates;
• Crane Industry Council of Australia – October, 2022 – 450 delegates.

The ACB with its determined national lead post COVID, is strongly responding to the vital fact that business events are economic drivers. They have been proven to leave a strong “economic tail” of new research collaborations, knowledge transfer, business agreements, and can lead to new businesses being set up locally.

“The economic value of business events has led to significant health and safety collaboration between the ACB and the State Government to ensure interstate business delegates have the confidence to see Adelaide as the safest city in which to resume the business face to face normality that we know companies have been crying out for,” says ACB Chief Executive Damien Kitto.

“This includes a stringent all-venue COVID management plan for business events worked on with Health SA, and it follows the COVID SA-fe business event plan released in June 2020. This coupled with our new State bidding strategy indicates we are ensuring a strong post COVID recovery,” he said.

Ozwater’21 is being held at the globally recognised Adelaide Convention Centre (ACC). Simon Burgess, General Manager of the ACC said confidence was key. “Having business event clients understand the safety Adelaide and its business event venues provide for their delegates is definitely enabling us to lead the national business event recovery through confidence,” he said. In conjunction with the ACB’s recovery methods, in the next few months the ACC will host Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Summit, Conference of Major Superannuation Funds and the Australian Medical Students’ Association National Convention.