BestCities Commitments: Raising the Bar for Sustainable Meetings
Dedicated to excellence, BestCities is an alliance of cities that never settles when it comes to business events.
The team at BestCities is committed to building a sustainable future for the BestCities Alliance and its partner destinations. That’s why we drafted the BestCities Commitment to a Sustainable Future – our promise to support and guide associations and destinations to enable sustainable meetings that leave a lasting legacy.
Elevating Industry Standards
One of the founding principles of BestCities is standards. Today, standards are even more important than they were in 2000, when BestCities was established. So, we created a service commitment programme relevant to our clients and partners that will help to raise industry standards.
Our BestCities Commitments enable us, as an Alliance, to:
- Address the Alliance’s value proposition to advocate on the positive impact created by international meetings, putting sustainability and legacy at the forefront of meeting design.
- Provide a standard entry level to the Alliance, thereby ensuring we are true to our values.
- Provide a differentiation message for clients.
- Have a programme that commits each partner to the other partners in the Alliance.
- Advocate for higher standards in the industry.
Each year, all partner destinations will be audited against our commitments by submitting their adherence to the commitments through an online portal.
Outcome of the BestCities Global Forum Madrid
On the first day of the Global Forum held in Madrid in December 2021, destinations were invited to sign up for BestCities’ Commitments to a Sustainable Future. Another outcome of the event in Spain was The Madrid Challenge, which takes these commitments a step further by securing a pledge from destinations and associations to integrate sustainability and inclusivity into future conference planning.
The Three Tiers of our Commitments
Tier 1
Client and Destination Commitments
- Infrastructure
- Ethics
- Affiliations
- Human Resources
- Client Requirements
- Bidding & Intelligence
Tier 2
Partner-to-Partner Commitments
- Business Planning
- Business Development
- Alliance Branding
- Partner-to-Partner Knowledge
Tier 3
Industry Advancement Commitments
- Legacy
- Sustainability
- Accessibility
- Education/ Knowledge Exchange
- Aspirational
Our Aspirational Commitments
As an Alliance, BestCities is committed to raising standards internally and externally to benefit partners and industry as a whole. A new addition to our commitments is our aspirational aims.
By creating aspirational standards, which will evolve annually to ensure standards are continually growing, we can track specific areas or practices where some partners excel. Then, we can match cities that have reached the aspirational level with cities that aspire to that level.
Aspirational commitments will help us fulfill our mission of creating a sustainable future, raising standards for the industry overall and, most importantly, differentiating BestCities partners from competitors.
Examples of aspirational standards could be:
- Undertaking local stakeholder engagement to bring key relevant stakeholders together with the association, with the goal of identifying common strategic aims and goals for the destination and association.
- Actively seeking opportunities to create legacy threads when a client is meeting in two or more BestCities destinations.
- Partner cities linking any subvention provided to sustainability and legacy outcomes.
Contact
Want to know more about our Commitment to a Sustainable Future? Get in touch with Nigel Brown.