The Slovenian capital, which has been present on the international association meetings market for more than thirty years, can be regarded as an established, yet still fresh destination that can welcome meetings with up to 2,200 delegates in the largest plenary capacity. The array of meeting facilities features two convention centres, several convention hotels and hotels with conference facilities, as well as a number of academic venues, the majority of which are in the downtown area. The “walking city” dimension of Ljubljana, which was crowned European Green Capital for 2016, is definitely one of its advantages.
The year 2015 promises to be a positive one, and although only one congress will go beyond 1,000 delegates, a series of mid-sized ones are on the calendar. A selection of the larger events in 2015 is featured below:
▶ At the CD – Cankarjev dom Congress Centre Ljubljana, a high concentration of events is visible in May and June, however also the autumn months are busy:
the 11th IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition – FG 2015 (300 delegates), Plant Health for Food Security (250 delegates), Medicine of South East Europe (600-800 delegates) , the 16th European Congress of Pediatric Surgery – EUPSA 2015 (600 delegates), the 13th Meeting of the European Neuro-Ophthalmological Society – EUNOS 2015 (300 delegates) and the 53rd Symposium of the International Society for Clinical Electrophysiology of Vision – ISCEV (200 delegates); in September, the 25th Annual Conference of Alzheimer Europe (500 delegates), the International Conference on Engineering Vibration IFToMM (300 delegates); in October, the CIVITAS Forum (500 delegates) will follow, while the last congress, organised by the Mediterranean Incontinence and Pelvic Floor Society (300 delegates), is scheduled in December.
▶ The main events at the GR – Ljubljana Exhibition and Convention Centre will instead be:
the 27th International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Levels – LEPTON PHOTON 2015 (August, 500 delegates) and the congress of the European Society of Regional Anaesthesia & Pain Therapy – ESRA (September, 1,500 delegates). The latter has the highest expected attendance among congresses in Ljubljana (and Slovenia) in 2015 and is the second larger project run by Kenes in the destination.
The Grand Hotel Union, which offers the largest hotel convention facilities in Ljubljana, is hosting this year several conferences of international and European associations attracting between 200 and 400 delegates, the largest being in mid October 2015: the 9th International Congress on Vascular Dementia – ICVD.
Confirmed congress bookings for Ljubljana are in place for as far as the year 2018. Destination partners focusing primarily on the corporate / incentive market are also giving a positive outlook for business in 2015.
