EDGE Venues

Air traffic controllers in Portugal will stage a series of new partial strikes beginning next week.

The controllers will stop working for two four-hour periods each day beginning on June 29 until July 3. Previous such strikes in April and May severely disrupted air traffic, with hundreds of flights affected.

In addition, pilots working for the state TAP ( Air Portugal) company that is due to be privatised before the end of the year as part of an international bailout, will not fly between July 5-8 and August 1-5.

The statistics on international congresses in 2011 just published by the Union of International Associations (UIA) once again – like the year before – rank Vienna in fourth place worldwide.

The first four places in the UIA 2011 statistics remained unchanged compared to 2010: the table was once again headed by Singapore, which achieved 919 international congresses according to the UIA criteria, followed by Brussels (464), Paris (336) and Vienna (286). The other cities in the top ten were Seoul, Budapest, Tokyo, Barcelona, Berlin and Geneva. In the countries ranking, where the USA (744) pushed Singapore into second place last year, Austria moved up from tenth place in 2010 to eighth place. Almost three quarters (74%) of the 390 international congress events recorded for Austria were held in Vienna.

Christian Mutschlechner, Director of the Vienna Tourist Board’s Vienna Convention Bureau, made the following comment on this ranking: “The competition for international congresses is getting stiffer from year to year, with more and more destinations entering the race. But Vienna has demonstrated consistency here. This is demonstrated no only by its ability to retain fourth place in the UIA ranking and first place in the statistics of the International Congress and Convention Association – which uses another method of counting international congresses – but also by the fact that Vienna has already occupied a leading position in both rankings for decades now.”