MEC 2026: Why the Two Best Days of the MICE Year Took Place at Lake Starnberg

There are ideas that are born in boardrooms, and there are ideas that come to life while your own four children are running around at preschool and you start building something on the side. MICE Portal belongs to the second category. What began as an agency has evolved over the years into a SaaS company, a platform where major clients now book events in the six- to seven-figure range. The MEC, the MICE Executive Circle, has been the place where this story adds a new chapter every year for over a decade. Last week, it happened again, and rarely has the gap between what was and what's to come been so palpable.

A place where organization takes a back seat

From Wednesday evening through Friday at noon, the industry gathered at the Chateauform Seminarhaus on Lake Starnberg in Feldafing, the first venue of its kind in southern Germany. The concept behind it fits remarkably well with the MEC. A dedicated host couple personally attends to every detail, meals and drinks are included in the flat rate, and at the bar, you serve yourself whenever you like. No waitstaff rituals, no bill at the end of the evening, just a setting that deliberately pushes organization into the background so that connections can take center stage. Chateauform describes the mission of its venues exactly this way, to reestablish connections in an increasingly fast-paced, digital world. An idea that would find a surprisingly precise parallel at the end of the first day.

Wednesday evening belonged to the first guests and to the things that are hard to plan. An aperitif, the first reunions between people, some of whom have been meeting at the MEC for years, and those casual conversations from which the true essence of this format has grown over the years. A quiet start, with no set program at all, and yet the moment when the MEC had, in fact, already begun.

A Look Back, a Look at the Next Generation

On Thursday morning, Josephine Gräfin von Brühl opened the day's program with a look back, further back than one might expect for a platform of this size. She recounted how the idea for MICE Portal came about, namely from an agency that evolved over the years into a SaaS company. Back then, digital event booking was little more than a vague concept.

The challenge against which the platform still measures itself today was the same back then. MICE is a moving target, commitments fall through, attendee numbers fluctuate, average order values range between six and eight thousand euros, and individual events can reach six-figure sums. Software that aims to handle this must also remain user-friendly for people who plan just one or two events a year and have neither the time nor the ambition to become professionals. It is precisely within this balancing act that MICE Portal has grown, with templates, guided processes, and each company's specific rules firmly embedded in the system, all complemented by a high degree of personal engagement through onboarding sessions, Q&A sessions, webinars, and an extensive knowledge base.

At the conclusion of her welcome remarks, Josephine looked ahead to the people who have carried MICE Portal thus far and will continue to do so in the years to come. Frederik Fix built the company’s first software and has continued to develop and shape it over the years; technologically, much of what is possible today can be traced back to the foundation he laid. Daniel Ritter has been with the company since he began his apprenticeship as an event management specialist 23 years ago and has built the sales division from the ground up. He works so closely with customers that he spontaneously stepped in at the MEC for a customer who was unable to attend. Sven Seidelmann has also been on board for years and, as head of Key Account Management, Partner Management, and Hotel Sales, oversees one of the central areas connecting clients and suppliers.

And then there’s the von Brühl family, which is represented several times over at the MICE Portal. As Josephine’s eldest son, Maximilian, in his role as Head of Marketing & Sales, is responsible for the company’s public image. His younger brother Philipp, as Head of Partners and Suppliers, cultivates the relationships that often lead to the next joint projects at MEC. However, most of the responsibility today lies jointly with Josephine and Vinzenz as managing partners, with Vinzenz additionally serving as product owner, business analyst, and data protection contact.

MICE Core Keynote: From Assistant to Agent

Immediately afterward, Vinzenz took the stage for the keynote. His presentation brought home just how much progress has been made on this topic since the last MEC. Ten months ago, it all started with a single assistant. What has become of it is called MICE Core, an AI layer over the entire system that consistently lowers the barrier to entry. Already today, a chat assistant plans entire events on demand, accesses stored templates and framework agreement partners, filters results, and builds the project step by step. What's crucial for enterprise deployment isn't so much the effect as it is reliability, no hallucinations, clearly defined boundaries, and a level of security that meets the demands of major clients.

The real breakthrough lay in the outlook. In the future, an autonomous mode will be able to start independently from a complete event brief, research vendors in the background, and send out initial inquiries, all while the human user is already working on something else. Multiple briefs at once, multiple projects running in parallel, without every step needing to be confirmed individually. Each project is assigned its own agent, who runs quietly in the background and knows which hotels have been contacted, who hasn't responded yet, and where offers are already available. With over 15,000 projects in the portal, this amounts to an entire workforce of such agents working around the clock.

Communication no longer takes place solely within the portal, but right where the work is happening. Via Teams or Slack, the agent reaches out on its own, points out a new offer, and asks if it should prepare the comparison right away. This also fundamentally changes the search process. Instead of clicking through filter screens, users can ask in natural language for a hotel near a lake, a boutique hotel in the Alps, or a room with a specific ceiling height, criteria that were virtually impossible to specify using traditional methods.

It was remarkable how openly the boundaries were negotiated. There's no autonomous booking of large sums, approval processes remain in place, every booking ultimately requires a human touch, and each company decides for itself which tasks the AI is even allowed to take on. Providers also benefit. In the future, hotels will be able to upload their offers, which will then be automatically mapped to services and prices. The real impact is felt at the end of the chain, at checkout, where this step saves both companies and hotels a noticeable amount of time and gets the latter their money faster.

Amid all the technology, one idea from the keynote stuck with me, one that goes beyond the software itself. The time saved is not an end in itself. Well-organized events have a measurable impact on a company's return on investment because people come together, ideas emerge, and teams grow closer. When AI takes over the manual tasks, it creates space for exactly that.

Three Perspectives, One Table

Immediately afterward, at the MICE Talks Live, three worlds came together that rarely sit at the same table in everyday life. Silvia Havemann from HDI representing the buyer side, Monika Hasenauer-Janssen from SnowWorld and Oliver Goslich from B&B Hotels representing the supplier side, along with Josephine von Brühl representing the platform. Patrick Meier from EnBW had to cancel at the last minute, so Daniel took over his role. He has been working with EnBW for years and has firsthand knowledge of their procurement perspective. It was precisely because their interests don’t always align that the discussion proved so insightful.  It highlighted where procurement, suppliers, and the platform are talking past each other, and where they need one another.

 After the coffee break, the discussion delved deeper. In two parallel co-creation labs, participants didn't give presentations, they got to work, with one group focusing on the MICE Agent and the other on the agency model. In the afternoon, the Best Practice Dialogues followed, once again featuring Daniel representing EnBW, along with Klaudia Komisaruk from Waldweit and Thomas Wilken from Villa Vita Pannonia. Here too, the focus was less on polished success stories and more on the honest question of what works in everyday practice and what doesn’t.

When Four Partners Envision a Process

The highlight of the afternoon in terms of content was the value-added mapping. Florian Gutzmer from CRC, Martin Munck from meetaX, Freek Zindel from aanmelder, and Alexander Pascuttini from onesto jointly demonstrated what an end-to-end process along the booking and payment chain can look like, from individual travel to event billing.

 With the AirPlus Company Account, CRC provides a unified payment channel for individual travel and MICE, eliminating the usual process breaks between two billing systems. Through its quota management, onesto ensures that booked quotas are synchronized directly into the booking engine without the need for duplicate data entry. With hivr.ai, meetaX offers AI-powered quote processing that automatically captures and qualifies hotel inquiries, generating quotes in a fraction of the time previously required. And aanmelder consolidates attendee management, from invitation to cancellation, in one place.

 Four partners, four areas of expertise, one insight that defined the afternoon. Value isn't created where systems are connected, but where partners honestly align their processes with one another. The use cases made this tangible because they weren't presented as pie-in-the-sky ideas, but as workflows that attendees have long since incorporated into their daily routines.

What Happens Between Program Items

In the late afternoon, the MEC moved out onto the water. For many, the optional ferry ride on Lake Starnberg turned out to be the real highlight of the day, precisely because nothing was staged here. The day’s topics were briefly left behind, the lake was calm, and the conversations lost the structure they’d had at the conference table. Over the coming months, some of these conversations will turn into concrete projects, just as has been the case at the MEC for years.

 Back on land, the grill was waiting in the garden. Instead of a traditional dinner, everyone enjoyed a barbecue outdoors that evening, with no assigned seating and a view of the lake. It was in this very relaxed atmosphere that what had been hinted at throughout the day became official, One MICE, an ecosystem that brings together booking, billing, attendee management, and AI into a single, seamless process. The fact that representatives from Chateauform were also present that evening added a layer of deeper meaning to the announcement. For thirty years, their business has thrived on freeing people's minds for genuine connections by ensuring that all organizational details fade into the background. At its core, One MICE pursues the same idea on a digital level, technology that creates time for what matters between people, rather than replacing it.

 Friday was all about grounding the discussion. During the practical roundtable, the major topics from the previous day were brought down to earth, from e-invoicing to the digital processes that actually have to work in day-to-day business. The concluding session on shared guidelines transformed two days of discussion into something binding, a common starting point for what lies ahead.

Three Takeaways from MEC 2026

At MICE Portal, AI isn't just a buzzword, it's a living reality. The path from reactive chat to autonomous agents has long been set in motion, with clear boundaries and genuine control on the customer's side.

Collaboration doesn't arise from interconnected software, but from trust between partners who honestly align their processes with one another. The value-chain mapping demonstrated this more impressively than any roadmap ever could.

And the most valuable moments arise where there's time to spare, on a boat, around the grill, in the conversations between program items, which in the end often make a bigger impact than the program items themselves.

MEC 2026 was not an event in the traditional sense, but rather a working format for people who truly want to rethink MICE procurement, open enough to discuss what isn't working yet, and curious enough about what will become possible. Anyone who couldn't make it this time should mark the next MEC on their calendar.