[News] VM Consulting Completes Yeosu Unique Venue Consulting

Proposes a “Town MICE Alliance” to Activate the Entire City

Beyond Individual Venues, Toward One City as a MICE Stage

VM Consulting, a Korea-based MICE and venue strategy consultancy led by CEO David Lee, has successfully completed the Yeosu Unique Venue Consulting Project in South Korea, presenting a new strategic direction that shifts the focus from individual venue development to citywide collaboration and connectivity. The consulting introduces the “Town MICE Alliance,” a model designed to activate the entire city of Yeosu, located on Korea’s southern coast, as a single experiential MICE platform by linking multiple unique venues into one cohesive ecosystem.

The three-month project covered five unique venues in Yeosu, South Korea—Hanok Hotel Odongjae, Damjaengi Healing Farm, Gomari Agricultural Corporation, Noktemare, and the Yeosu Youth Support Center. Through on-site inspections, in-depth interviews with venue operators, and capability assessments, VM Consulting analyzed each venue’s distinctive strengths and structural limitations, developing both venue-specific strategies and an integrated city-level MICE framework. The findings revealed that while Yeosu’s unique venues reflect Korea’s diverse assets—including traditional heritage, nature-based healing, media art, and youth-oriented cultural content—individual venues face inherent limitations in attracting and scaling MICE events on their own.

To address these challenges, VM Consulting proposed the Town MICE Alliance, a collaborative model that connects accommodation, meetings, experiential programs, dining, and networking across multiple venues throughout the city, rather than concentrating events in a single facility. By curating these spaces into one unified MICE journey, the model transforms Yeosu itself into the venue, offering place-based experiences that extend beyond conventional convention-center formats and encouraging longer stays and deeper engagement with the host city in Korea.

The consulting also emphasized the importance of establishing a cooperative system among Yeosu’s designated unique venues to enable information sharing, content exchange, and joint event bidding. This approach is expected to strengthen Yeosu’s preparedness for large-scale international events, including the 2026 Yeosu World Island Expo in South Korea, while laying the foundation for long-term urban MICE competitiveness and positioning Yeosu as a sustainable “stay-and-experience” MICE destination in Korea.

David Lee, CEO of VM Consulting, stated, “Our goal is to transform cities into MICE ecosystems, not by strengthening individual venues, but by connecting them—and Yeosu’s Town MICE Alliance is a strong starting point for Korea.”

(C) VM Consulting