Business tourism, conceptual approach to its development, contextualization and benefits. A case of success in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico.

Abstract

The so-called tourism of Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) is a specialization in the way of doing tourism based on trips whose purpose is mainly business. This specialized variant of tourism has maintained a constant growth during the last decades within the service market. It is a type of tourism recently identified under various characteristics that describe it as a niche market based on the meetings or events industry, or simply business tourism. All its denominations maintain an associated concept.

Currently, MICE tourism, being a global industry that focuses its objective on the scope of various productive modalities in the three sectors of the economy, maintains an accelerated and vertiginous growth that has evolved towards highly specialized concepts within the industry, whose interactions maintain constant and vertiginous changes that imply optimal management between customer-service, service-service, industry-industry, industry- services or industry-end customers, fundamentally.

The general objective of the present work is to carry out a characterization of MICE tourism throughout its implementation and development, through the realization of national and international exhibitions in fairgrounds designed expressly, events organized with the support of a chain of complementary services that make up a cluster to serve a highly specialized tourism segment. The particular objective is aimed at exposing the benefits that this industry generates throughout its value chain, in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area (ZMG), cataloged as one of the most important MICE destinations in Mexico.