LIFE is busy. Sometimes I need my caffeine fix, and often I find myself in a long queue, waiting patiently for the barista to take my order.
There was a time when this used to frustrate me. But now – it couldn’t make me happier.
You see, I use the length of queues in Belfast’s coffee shops as a barometer for our economic status. Busy coffee shops mean busy people being part of something – playing an active part in our economy.
My role as chief executive of ICC Belfast, Northern Ireland’s only purpose-built international convention centre, is to attract corporate conference and convention style events.
These events typically take place over a three-day period and have a minimum of 600 delegates per day, many of whom are out-of-state visitors travelling to Belfast for the first time. They drink coffee too. They also stay in our hotels, drinks in our bars, eat in our restaurants and shop in our shops.
Each of these delegates contribute up to £488 a day to the Northern Ireland economy. Let’s think that through, this is ‘new money’ injected into our economy that would otherwise be spent in competitor cities such as Dublin, Birmingham or Prague.
These delegates are business tourists, and they are hugely important to us. Each year, business tourism is worth around £80 million to the Northern Ireland economy. This is an impressive figure but it’s one that has the potential for exponential growth given that business tourism, according to the latest Events Industry Council/Oxford Economics research, generated $1.07 trillion of direct spending and $1.5 trillion of GDP to the global economy.
Today ICC Belfast generates an economic impact for Belfast of £20 million a year, which is brilliant. However, together with our partners including Belfast City Council, Visit Belfast and Tourism Northern Ireland, this figure could be doubled to £40m per annum if the region's business tourism proposition is appropriately funded and represented on an international stage.
Let me explain my background to this. I joined the venue in 2016, following a £29.5 million redevelopment by Belfast City Council, Tourism NI and the European Regional Development Fund of what was then known as Belfast Waterfront.
Having previously worked internationally delivering the food and infrastructure project in the Olympic Village for the Beijing and London Summer Olympic Games as a managing director of Aramark, a global customer service business across food and facilities, I was keen to transfer the knowledge and skills I had honed to an organisation I knew had the potential to be a ‘best-in-class’ international conference venue.
I’m not from Belfast, I’m a Sligo native (actually a small village called Coolaney), but I took the role at ICC Belfast because I saw the opportunity to help elevate Belfast’s global profile through business tourism. I believe this is crucial to the economic development of this great city. Business tourism drives the mid-week night-time economy; fills hotel beds during off peak periods; generates business for suppliers; supports our retail sector and helps to sustain the agri-food sector throughout Northern Ireland.
I work as part of a passionate team and with committed partners, none more so than Visit Belfast and Tourism NI who do a fantastic job putting Belfast and all of Northern Ireland on the map. There is a genuine collective energy and ambition to win conferencing and events business – and we are going in the right direction.
ICC Belfast is targeted with delivering 50,000 delegate days a year and £100 million of economic impact to the city of Belfast by March 2021. We are on track to meet these targets - having achieved £85.5m economic impact to date.
Our vision is to double the business and grow financial surplus by 2023. We could double the economic impact delivered to £200m if (… and it’s a big if) we secure the right conferencing and events business in the next five years.
Our challenge is that we can’t do it alone.
Look at the competition – as a destination city we are often up against Dublin, Birmingham and even Barcelona and Prague. All of these cities have aligned business tourism strategies, but in Northern Ireland, outside of our partners – we have limited representation on the international stage. Deals are done in the global marketplace – and we need to be competing for this business with the full support of government.
We need an aligned approach and political representation to champion our cause. The need for this is heightened as the public and private sectors are operating in an (as yet) unclear landscape of a post-Brexit United Kingdom and navigating potential changes to our supply chain and destination accessibility.
We need cathedral thinking that recognises the opportunity and puts an infrastructure in place that will deliver not just today – but tomorrow and beyond.
The potential economic, societal and cultural benefits are huge – but we must harness that potential. To do this we need the backing of our political leaders to define a strategy that gets us on a level playing field with the competition.
There is a well-documented hiatus that has frozen our political landscape. We continue to roll our sleeves up; we continue to show resilience and we will continue to win business. For a moment, imagine what it would be like if we could harness our full potential? Imagine just how long the coffee shop queues would be then.
:: Catherine Toolan is chief executive of ICC Belfast
