Panama’s MICE association grows with 7 new members

Observing Global Meeting Industry Day, the Association of Panamanian Professionals in Meetings, Exhibits & Related Activities (APPCE), held a breakfast meeting with representatives of its active membership.

The association’s Board of Directors took the opportunity to formally welcome all companies that have joined the entity since the beginning of 2019. These are Ingetronic (Audio-visual engineering), Panama Meetings (an events planning firm), Hotel Continental Panamá, Wyndham Panama Albrook Mall Hotel, Fludge (audio-visual services), and Kamay Displays (display & exhibit solutions).

It is important to mention that our company, Meetings Panama, a multimedia platform devoted to the promotion of Panama’s MICE industry, is also one of APPCE’s newest members.

According to APCCE treasurer Jorge Him Casanova, the organization was first founded in 1979, a fact that demonstrates the great vision of its pioneers in times when the industry was still in its infancy outside traditional markets, such as Europe and North America. Those first years, nevertheless, were by no means easy. He explained:

“The association became inactive twice after a number of years of activity. The organization’s current resurgence took place in 2016 and has established the raising of the industry’s professional standards as its main objective since there are many companies in our country that are devoted to MICE event planning despite their lack of international standards”.

Despite its relatively recent reactivation, Him stated that the entity has been able to achieve quite a lot in the last two years. He explained, “Although we were virtually non-existent a couple of years ago, our tenacity was the driving force behind the organization of Cocal’s 38^th Congress, one of the most important international MICE-industry events, which took place last month at Panama City’s Megapolis Convention Center. The activity was our way of saying to the world ‘We are here! And this is what we are capable of doing!’”.

Jorge Him also stated that the organization is currently in a strengthening phase in which “…we are giving priority to our structure and statutes, in order to materialize the objectives that prompted our establishment, and offer aggregate value to our members”.

APPCE’s membership presently comprises 22 active members. Its current president is Luis Ricardo Martinez, General Manager of Expo Eventos de Panamá.