plenary Berlin + IMEX 2012 + Signature Drinks CONVENE ON SITE Berlin Is Making History
At left, Potsdam’s Sanssouci palace; below, Berlin Wall East Side Gallery.
T
he first history lesson came just minutes after I arrived in Berlin for an educational tour
of the city sponsored by the German Convention Bureau (GCB) in May. Did I know, the cab driver asked as we trav- eled along leafy streets between Tegel Airport and East Berlin, that the airport was built for the 1948 Berlin Airlift, when the West flew in food and supplies after the Soviet Union blockaded land routes into the city? The past, I would find, is never
far away in Berlin, and — as I also learned —there’s never been a better time to meet there. The city ranks first for meetings in Europe and is the fourth most-popular city globally for association meetings, according to the International Congress and Convention Association. New hotels and restaurants, commercial and civic developments, and cultural institutions have remade Berlin’s skyline over the last decade, and reconfigured the size and scope of the meetings and events industry, whose revenue has doubled, while the number of hotel room nights generated by meetings has tripled.
20 PCMA CONVENE JULY 2012
I stayed with a group of North
American and Brazilian planners — all of us headed to IMEX in Frankfurt the following week — at the sleek and stylish, 557-room andel’s Hotel Berlin, whose 14-story-high Sky Bar features prime views of the Soviet-built Televi- sion Tower on Alexanderplatz, an East Berlin landmark. The spacious property offers 40,000 square feet of meeting space, four restaurants, and an in- house events team. After cocktails, dinner our first night
was at the classically elegant, 278-room Hotel Palace Berlin, near the Berlin Zoo and Tiergarten Park in West Berlin. The hotel’s second-floor conference level provides 26,000 square feet of meeting space in 17 rooms and can accommo- date groups of up to 900 people. The next morning, we toured the
city’s landmarks, including such icons as The Reichstag, graffiti-covered rem- nants of the Berlin Wall, and Museum Island, along with relative newcom- ers like the modernist 2001 Jewish Museum. Then we walked through the front door of an unassumingly boxy building, just steps away from
the Brandenburg Gate, to find stun- ning organic forms created in wood, glass, and steel. The building, housing offices and the Axica meeting venue, was designed by Frank Gehry, who has called it his best work. The venue’s spaces can accommodate a variety of meeting and events, including a recep- tion for 600. Germany leads the world in environ-
mental technology, and green meetings are a way of life in Berlin, said Laura d’Elsa, GCB’s regional director for the United States and Canada. (There are so many solar arrays on the city’s rooftops that, as my plane landed, the sun glancing off them made me think of flashbulbs at a red-carpet event.) Our group visited the city’s first carbon- neutral venue, the tent-shaped Tem- podrom Berlin, which originated as an actual canvas tent where punk concerts were staged. The venue’s arena can seat 3,500 attendees. We took another turn around the
historic city center on Sunday morning, but this time in a caravan of noisy, East German–made Trabants, which feature a two-stroke, 40-horsepower engine. The