BCD Meetings & Incentives named in ‘Top 25’ leading provider list

CHICAGO, 17 September 2007 – BCD Meetings & Incentives today announced that it has been named to the ‘CMI 25,’ a list of North America’s largest and most influential fullservice, independent meeting and incentive companies focused on the corporate market.

Compiled by Penton Media’s Corporate Meetings & Incentives® magazine, the leading information source for the $40.3 billion corporate meetings and events industry, the CMI 25 provides an essential resource for corporate executives and meeting professionals seeking partners for outsourcing all or parts of their programmes. The CMI 25 appears in the September issue of Corporate Meetings & Incentives and is available on the Web at www.meetingsnet.com.

“The CMI 25 list represents the leading companies in the industry, based on extensive research by our staff,” said Barbara Scofidio, editor of Corporate Meetings & Incentives. “As outsourcing of meeting and incentive travel programme planning becomes increasingly important to corporate America, the CMI 25 have become the ‘go-to’ service providers for executives in many sectors.”

Over the last 18 months, BCD M&I has emerged as an influential global player in the industry, after bringing together three legacy companies — U.S.-based WorldTravel Meetings & Incentives, U.K.-based Talking Point and the continental European operations of TQ3 Events (a subdivision of TQ3 Travel Solutions Management Holding GmbH) — to form a global organisation that specialises in meetings, incentives, creative services and production. BCD M&I has a presence in 25 countries in Europe, the Americas and Asia/Pacific, with annual sales of approximately $250 million and a combined work force of 350 employees. BCD M&I’s world headquarters is Chicago, with regional hubs in San Francisco, Mexico City, London, Brussels and Singapore.

“It truly is an honour to be recognised as a CMI 25 company,” said Scott Graf, president of BCD Meetings & Incentives. “Our expanded resources in key markets and our dedication to providing global presence, regional alignment and local service to our customers has yielded fantastic results over the last year, in both the strategic meetings management and MICE sectors. With additional growth opportunities in the Americas and Asia/Pacific regions, as well as the expansion of our global offering to include production services, we have set an aggressive goal to double the size of our agency over the next three years.”

The magazine’s editors selected CMI 25 companies based on several factors, including the number of meetings and incentive travel programmes managed in 2006 and the total number of room nights represented by those meetings and incentives. They also evaluated the number of full-time employees at each company, as well as the percentage of the company’s revenues that came from organising corporate meetings and incentives, versus association meetings or other sources.