Further business worth just under $70 million in direct attendee expenditure from among the famil’s delegates is in the pipeline.
micenet was the only media invited to attend the event which saw 40 buyers from national and international associations, plus PCO and corporate incentive decision makers travel to Perth. The group comprised 23 Australian decision makers and 17 international buyers from Asia, the UK, Europe and North America.
Almost all of the bureau staff were involved in facilitating aspects of the three-night, four-day event that covered immersive experiences across Perth, Fremantle and Rottnest Island.
Business Events Perth CEO Gareth Martin explains that the event was named reawaken “in the sense of re-awakening from the slumber that lay with COVID”.
“[It was] also an opportunity to reconnect with this part of the world for clients who may not have considered Western Australia in recent times for an event they want to produce.”
Martin said it was designed as four bespoke programs that allowed invitees to choose based on the types of activities they believed would resonate with their event delegates.
While some of us on the rejuvenate program paddled inflatable kayaks on the Swan River and enjoyed a massage beside a private pool at Rottnest Island’s Samphire resort, the reactivate team abseiled from tall structures and participated in other adrenalin-fuelled acts such as zip-lining. Those on the replenish team got to enjoy the local food and wines of Western Australia, while those in the reimagine team were focused on professional conference planning.
Martin said the sectors the famil delegates represented were health, education, agriculture, engineering, energy, finance and science. Interestingly WA’s biggest industry, mining, was not represented within this group.
After our concurrent experiences each day the whole group came together for a lunch or dinner during which time Martin said the invitees got to experience “some professional development themselves in the sense that they get to talk about events that they produce with their peers and to potentially find that sometimes they have similar challenges or they can find other opportunities to solve issues that they may have singularly organising conferences for their associations”.
Clearly pleased with the multi-themed event, Martin and his director of client engagement, Tracey Cinavas-Prosser, are already planning a third Reawaken program with some tweaking.
“We’ve taken some lessons from this event,” Martin says, “and I think what we will do in future is just split the event into two…describing the types of clients that come to Western Australia and the time of year they would generally host their events…to reposition it as an association PCO mega famil and then a separate corporate incentive Asia, North Asia famil as well,” he said, adding that the Perth market was about 70 per cent association and 30 per cent corporate incentive.
Cinavas-Prosser, who had operational responsibility for the event, said that while the multi-themed program giving attendees a choice was very well received, “it was exciting to see them all come together at night, seated with entirely different people and with great gusto really buy into the program and share their experience”.
