What Is MICE? A Practical Guide for Companies in India

MICE stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions. It is the travel and events industry's name for business travel that brings groups of people together for a purpose, rather than for a holiday. If your company has ever taken its sales team on a reward trip, held a leadership meet at a resort or sent delegates to a conference, you have already organised MICE travel.

This guide explains the four parts of MICE, how MICE differs from regular travel, and what to settle before you ask an agency for a proposal.

The four parts of MICE

Meetings

Board meetings, leadership reviews, training sessions and team offsites. The goal is usually a decision or alignment: getting the right people into one room, away from day-to-day distractions. A meeting needs the right venue, a room set up for the format, reliable audio-visual equipment, and stay and transfers for everyone attending.

Incentives

Incentive travel rewards employees, dealers or channel partners for hitting their targets. Done well, it becomes something people work towards all year. Incentive trips and R&R events are built around the destination and the experiences: a beach dinner, a city tour, a match, an awards evening in front of colleagues.

Conferences

Conferences are larger gatherings with a programme of sessions, speakers and delegates. Companies use them for annual kick-offs, sales conferences and leadership meets; professional bodies use them for knowledge sharing. Medical conferences and CMEs (continuing medical education) often add abstract submissions and review to the work.

Exhibitions and events

Exhibitions put your brand in front of buyers at trade shows and expos, with booths, exhibitor coordination and visitor experiences. Many companies read the E in MICE as Events too: annual meets, award nights, product launches and celebrations are planned in the same way.

How MICE travel differs from a regular trip

• It has a business objective. Every choice, from the destination to the dinner, should serve it.
• Groups move together. Flights, rooms, transfers and timings have to work for 20, 50 or 200 people at once.
• There is a programme. Sessions, presentations and team activities sit alongside the travel.
• The dates are usually fixed. There is little room to move them if a venue or a flight is full.
• Someone is accountable for the result. HR, sales or leadership teams need the programme to run smoothly and to report on it afterwards.

What a MICE company does

A MICE company plans and manages the whole programme, so your team deals with one partner instead of a travel agent, an event agency and a long list of vendors. The work usually covers:

1. Understanding the objective, the audience and the budget, and turning them into a plan and a timeline.
2. Finding and contracting venues: hotels, convention centres and unique spaces.
3. Booking flights, accommodation, transportation and transfers for every participant.
4. Managing registration and pre-event communication.
5. Arranging catering, audio-visual, staging and décor, and managing those suppliers.
6. Tracking the budget, payments and invoices.
7. Running the programme on the ground and handling issues as they come up.
8. Gathering feedback and reporting on results after the event.

The parts work best together

Many of the most effective programmes combine more than one part of MICE. Our incentive trip to the Maldives for Zydus Lifesciences, for example, mixed business sessions with a resort stay and a beach dinner. A dealer meet can become an incentive by adding a destination, and a conference can end with an awards evening. Planning travel and events with the same team makes these combinations much easier to run.

Before you ask for a proposal

You'll get faster, more accurate options if you can answer these questions first:

• What should the programme achieve for the business?
• Who is attending, and roughly how many people?
• Which dates or months work, and how many days?
• Do you have a destination in mind, or should it be suggested?
• What is the approximate budget, and what does it need to include?
• Are there must-haves, such as a meeting room for the whole group or an awards night?

When you're ready, share these details through our enquiry form and our team will come back with destinations, venues and costs. You can also read more about our conference organising and corporate event management services.