The cities Latin America forgot to sell to the world
São Paulo, Mexico City, Bogotá, and Buenos Aires are economic powerhouses. The global MICE industry has not noticed yet.
Every year, Cvent releases its ranking of the world’s top meeting destinations. Every year, the usual names appear. Orlando leads North America for the 11th consecutive year. London anchors Europe for the fourth. Singapore owns Asia-Pacific. And every year, Latin America’s largest cities watch from the outside.
Not because they are small. São Paulo is the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere. Mexico City has a metropolitan population of over 21 million. Buenos Aires and Bogotá are regional economic and cultural capitals with established international airports, sophisticated hospitality sectors, and decades of experience hosting major events. These are not emerging cities. They are global cities. And yet, when corporate event planners sit down to choose where to bring 3,000 delegates for a major industry conference, they rarely land on any of them.
That gap is worth examining carefully.
What Orlando actually built
Before diagnosing Latin America, it is worth understanding what Orlando actually did. Because Orlando is not a natural global meetings hub. It is a theme park city in central Florida that made a deliberate, long-term decision to become something else.
The Orange County Convention Center, the second largest in the United States, offers 4.6 million square feet of event space. Orlando International Airport handled 57.7 million passengers in 2025, more than Miami. The hotel network is enormous, connected to the convention center by elevated walkways, ranging from budget to ultra-luxury, and built to absorb tens of thousands of visitors simultaneously. Behind all of this is Visit Orlando, a publicly and privately funded destination marketing organization with a clear mandate: bring the world’s events here.
Orlando did not wait for the world to discover it. It built the infrastructure, funded the marketing, created the conditions, and then went out and competed aggressively for every major event on the global calendar. That is the model.
The gap is structural, not cultural
Latin America’s largest cities have real advantages. South America captured nearly 5% of the global MICE market in 2025, generating close to USD 60 billion in revenue, with São Paulo and Buenos Aires cited as primary drivers. Brazil hosted 234 ICCA-profile international events in 2024, a 50% increase compared to the previous year, climbing to 15th place in the global ICCA rankings. Buenos Aires remained Latin America’s top city in the ICCA 2024 rankings, while Colombia and Panama posted notable gains.
The momentum is real. The infrastructure gap, however, is also real.
São Paulo processes over 70 million passengers annually across Guarulhos and Congonhas, but international connectivity remains constrained by slot limitations, airline route economics, and airport capacity that was not designed with large-scale event inflows in mind. Bringing 5,000 delegates from Europe, North America, and Asia into the city simultaneously requires a level of logistical coordination that London, Amsterdam, and Singapore handle almost invisibly. In São Paulo, it is still a project.
The hotel supply is growing but uneven. The city has world-class properties, but the sheer volume and variety of rooms needed to absorb a major convention, across multiple price points, within walking distance or easy transit from the venue, is not consistently there. Mexico City and Buenos Aires face similar constraints. Bogotá, at altitude and with a more limited international flight network, faces additional barriers for inbound long-haul delegates.
Urban mobility is another variable that corporate event organizers weigh seriously. A delegate who lands at Guarulhos, needs 90 minutes in traffic to reach their hotel, and then faces another unpredictable commute to the venue every morning is less likely to recommend that destination to the next year’s organizing committee. Cities like Singapore and Amsterdam solved this problem deliberately, investing in airport-to-city infrastructure with the events economy explicitly in mind.
And then there is security. This is uncomfortable to discuss, but it is a real factor in destination selection. International associations and corporate event teams conduct formal risk assessments before committing to a venue city. Destinations with high perceived security risks face a structural disadvantage that no amount of beautiful venues or competitive hotel pricing can fully overcome. Latin America’s major cities carry reputational burdens here that require sustained, documented improvement over years, not just reassurance.
The missing piece: political will
What separates Orlando, London, and Singapore from São Paulo and Mexico City is not ultimately geography or climate or the quality of the food. It is the presence of a coherent, funded, long-term strategy to compete in the global events economy.
Vienna has a dedicated convention bureau that has operated continuously for decades, building relationships with international associations, tracking which events are coming up for bid, and making targeted proposals years in advance. Lisbon ranked number one globally for international association meetings in ICCA’s 2025 city rankings, attracting over 100,000 participants, the result of years of sustained investment in destination marketing, venue infrastructure, and proactive bidding.
Latin America’s major cities have not consistently operated at that level. The investment in destination marketing organizations is fragmented. The public-private coordination needed to compete for major events is inconsistent. Visa policy, which is a genuine barrier for international delegates traveling from Asia and parts of Africa, changes slowly and without the events industry explicitly in mind.
Latin America and the Middle East were the only regions to show consistent year-over-year growth in the number of meetings recorded from 2022 to 2024. That growth is encouraging. It also means the window is open. The question is whether the region’s cities will treat that momentum as evidence that things are improving on their own, or as a signal to accelerate.
What it would actually take
The path is not mysterious. It requires airport infrastructure investment with international connectivity as an explicit goal. It requires hotel development incentives that produce volume and variety, not just luxury. It requires funded, professional destination marketing organizations with clear performance mandates. It requires visa reform that reduces friction for international delegates. It requires sustained, measurable progress on urban security. And it requires political leadership that treats the events economy not as a tourism subsidy but as a strategic economic sector with multiplier effects across hospitality, aviation, services, and local commerce.
São Paulo already hosts over 90,000 events per year. It concentrates 70% of Brazil’s trade fair market. The bones are there. So are the talent, the gastronomy, the cultural energy, and the business ecosystem that global event organizers find compelling.
The ranking is not the goal. The ranking is the signal that the strategy is working. Latin America’s great cities have spent long enough watching from the outside. The infrastructure to compete exists. What is missing is the decision to actually do it.
About me
I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.
A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.