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August 2011 Destination Report Visit England 8 In 2010, England received 25.5 million overseas visitors, with a combined spend of £14.5 billion. Of these, 5.5 million visited for business (spend £3.6bn) and out of that total, 1.05 million came for a trade fair, exhibition, conference or large meeting, spending £867million. From the period May 2010 – April 2011, there was a 7% increase in the number of business visits to the UK compared to the period May 2009 – April 2010. The bulk of these visitors came from North America, Western Europe, India, China and Brazil. By James Chen he more popular venues for conventions and exhibitions in England include Excel/qeii in London, Nec/ICC in Birmingham, Manch Central in Manchester, ACC Liverpool in Liverpool, SageGateshead in Newcastle and also Brighton Centre in Brighton. T England boasts some excellent convention hotels throughout the country and universities such as Oxford and Cambridge in particular are very popular with conventions and exhibitions. The United Kingdom was ranked 4th in the world by International Congress and Convention Association's (ICCA's) country rankings for the number of business events hosted in 2010 with 399 meetings. U.S.A. came in fi rst with 623 meetings, followed by Germany and Spain. United Kingdom was ranked 3rd in Europe, behind Germany's 542 meetings and Spain's 451 meetings. In the city rankings, London was ranked 14th with 97 meetings. The European cities of Vienna (154 meetings), Barcelona (148 meetings) and Paris (147 meetings) took the top 3 places. Events