Nevertheless, Visit Finland managed to organize 5 FAM trips and 9 buyer events in different markets. To compensate the drop in the number of live meetings, Visit Finland was highly active digitally and organized 14 virtual buyer events. 

In total, we helped to organize over 1100 meetings between Finnish tourism operators and international buyers during last year, despite all the challenges. In 2022 Visit Finland is aiming at organizing even more opportunities for our international partners to meet with Finnish travel industry suppliers. 

Midnight Sun Workshop is Visit Finland's largest international "by invitation only" sales event of 2022, which brings together Finnish suppliers and international hosted buyers from Visit Finland’s and Finnair’s main markets.

The Midnight Sun Workshop aims to promote and sell Finland as an interesting summer destination – without forgetting Finland's winter travel opportunities either.  Our goal is to facilitate a high-quality workshop where suppliers and buyers meet each other in beautiful Finnish midsummer scenery. 

Buyers will have the possibility to participate in pre- and post-tours. During the tours they will experience main travel regions of Finland and a wide range of Finnish summer products.

Midnight Sun Workshop will be held in Turku and Naantali in June 2022, in co-operation with Visit Turku and Visit Naantali.

We plan several local workshops and other live events during spring and autumn 2022. For example, in DACH and Benelux-markets, 12 new events are added to the calendar as Visit Finland reintroduces the Sales Run-event format together in co-operation with Nordic Marketing. 

The 5 countries’ workshop will be arranged as a live event in London in early February 2022 for 12th time, together with Iceland, Estonia, Greenland and Faroe Islands. 

At the end of March, the first global The Great Outdoors -WebiWorkshop invites global buyers to enjoy the event filled with inspiration and productive meetings. The day will include an outdoor-themed webinar and the possibility for online meetings afterwards. A similar kind of event will be organized with the theme Finland, Winter Wonderland on 18th October. 

Finnish suppliers will meet French travel trade in Paris at the workshop that will be arranged together with Iceland and Norway in May 2022.

All the events, in Finland as well as in local markets, will be organized considering the current health and safety measures.

The event industry is likely to evolve even more in the upcoming months. Hybrid events and more advanced event types are likely to be seen more often than in pre-pandemic times. 

Even though digital events may never be able to replace live events, together with technological advancements they open new channels for communication and ways to meet new and old partners. We believe they are here to stay, as complementary ways to create and maintain international business relationships.

03/02/2022