In 2025, international congresses in Vienna drew 310,813 participants and generated 1,558,986 overnight stays, according to the Vienna Convention Bureau’s Meeting Industry Report. The same report puts the average international congress at 2.8 days. Divide the nights by the participants and you get roughly five nights per delegate. Even allowing for an arrival evening and companions in the count, a large share of those nights falls outside the programme.
Those extra nights illustrate bleisure from the destination’s perspective. Most articles on the topic take the traveller’s view: how to add a weekend in Lisbon to a sales trip. For a destination marketing organisation (DMO) or a congress organiser, the practical questions are who planned those extra nights and how they can be measured.
Often, neither responsibility is clearly assigned. This guide explains how organisers and DMOs can plan extensions together and record them in registration data to demonstrate their value for the destination. It covers pre- and post-congress tours, accompanying person programmes, hosted buyers who stay on, the registration fields that make extensions countable and a simple model to measure them.
Keep one person in mind while reading: the head of the convention bureau. Sooner or later, the city’s tourism committee will ask her what the congress support actually brought in.
What bleisure means from the destination side
Her answer needs a clear definition first, because the word covers several behaviours.
Bleisure combines business and leisure. A business traveller adds private days before or after a work trip, or brings a partner along. The travel industry also calls it blended travel. The mirror image, adding business meetings to a holiday, is sometimes called reverse bleisure. A workation is something else again: working remotely from a holiday location, without a business occasion.
For a destination that hosts a congress, bleisure shows up in three forms. Each one has a different owner:
| Form | What happens | Who can shape it | What you can count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extension | The delegate arrives early or stays after the congress | Organiser (dates, hotel rates), DMO (offers) | Extra nights per delegate |
| Companion travel | A partner or family member travels with the delegate | Organiser (companion registration), DMO and DMC (programme) | Companions per delegate and their nights |
| Return visit | The delegate comes back later as a tourist | DMO (follow up marketing) | Hard to attribute, survey only |
The first two forms can be planned. The third is a welcome bonus, but not something you can schedule.
The numbers: delegates already extend
Bleisure is not a niche behaviour waiting to be encouraged. It already happens at scale, and the data from 2025 and 2026 is consistent.
In the study “Meet Tomorrow’s Business Travelers”, published in March 2025, American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) and Ipsos surveyed 1,817 business travellers in the UK and the US. 62 per cent said they had extended business trips to include leisure travel. Among the most frequent travellers the share rose to 68 per cent, and 68 per cent of all respondents would have liked to extend their last trip. The demand is there. Your congress is simply one of the trips it attaches to.
Congress data points the same way. In the Helsinki Congress Delegate Survey 2025, with 579 delegates from 80 countries, 66 per cent extended their stay after the congress, and nearly half did not travel alone. A delegate survey by Tourism PEI on Prince Edward Island, Canada, covering May 2024 to April 2025, found that delegates stayed 2.80 nights on average, of which 2.31 nights were for the meeting. 48 per cent attended with at least one other person. For a congress with 2,000 delegates, that can mean several hundred companions whom nobody planned for.
Bleisure in numbers
Most delegates already stay longer than the programme
There is a counterforce, and organisers should take it seriously. The SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey 2025, with 3,750 business travellers in 24 markets, found that 27 per cent had recently started adding personal travel to business trips to save costs. At the same time, 25 per cent said their company had cut back on allowing exactly that. The extension is negotiated with an employer, often a cautious one.
Delegates’ travel policies also shape the demand for extensions.
Why the extra nights fall through the cracks
If delegates extend anyway, why plan it at all? Because unplanned extensions are invisible, and invisible nights do not help anyone in a budget meeting.
Three blind spots explain why. The room block covers the congress nights, so the organiser sees the pick-up, not the stay. Delegates book the extra nights privately, often in another hotel or a short stay apartment. The DMO receives total overnight stays from the statistics office months later, without any link to a specific event. And the registration form asks for dietary needs and a badge name, but rarely for arrival and departure dates.
Picture a cardiology congress that closes on Thursday at one o’clock. A delegate from Chicago sits in a café near the venue with her flight booked for Sunday. On her phone she books a museum ticket, a dinner and a day trip to the coast. The destination has earned three days of spending. The congress report to the tourism committee shows three nights in the block.
The extra weekend took place, but it does not appear in the report.
This is exactly the gap the bureau director runs into. She can show the city’s total overnight stays, but not the share that this congress caused, and certainly not how much more a better plan could have added.
Five levers organisers and DMOs can plan together
The fix starts long before registration opens, with decisions that organiser and DMO share. The five levers below can work without a large budget, provided both partners agree on responsibilities.
1. Dates that invite a weekend
A congress that ends on a Thursday or Friday, or starts on a Monday, puts a weekend next to the programme. That scheduling decision gives delegates a practical opportunity to extend their stay. In the hotel contract, ask for the group rate to apply for two or three shoulder nights before and after the congress. Delegates who can keep their room at the congress rate have one less reason to leave early, and the extra nights stay visible in the block.
2. Pre- and post-congress tours
Organised tours of one to three days, run by a local destination management company (DMC), give the extension a shape. For scientific and professional congresses, technical visits work well: a university hospital, a port, a research campus, a wine region with a story behind it. Offer them in the registration process, set a minimum number of participants and a cut-off date six to eight weeks before the congress, so the DMC can confirm or cancel in time.
3. A real accompanying person programme
Nearly half of delegates in Helsinki and PEI did not travel alone. Companions need their own registration category, a daytime programme while the delegates sit in sessions and a place at the social evenings. Free time matters to delegates as well. Our guide to planning an incentive travel programme shows that free time now ranks level with relationship building in what participants value, and the same holds for a delegate with a partner in town.
4. Hosted buyers who stay on
Trade shows and workshops with hosted buyer programmes already fly in qualified buyers, often at the organiser’s expense. Many destinations use the days after the show for a familiarisation trip, which turns the extension into a sales tool. How such a trip is structured is explained in what a fam trip is. The meeting schedule plays a part, too. When a buyer’s appointments are planned in a compact block, everyone knows from the start which days remain free for site inspections and a programme run by the destination.
5. An easy conversation with the employer
The SAP Concur data shows that employers set the limits. Make their approval easy: list business nights and private nights as separate items on the hotel invoice, issue a certificate of attendance with the official programme dates and state clearly where the congress ends. A delegate who can show her manager that the private nights cost the company nothing has a much easier conversation.
Policy friction is a design problem. Organisers can solve it.
Capture it at registration: five fields that make bleisure measurable
Each lever produces data, but only if registration asks for it. Five short questions are enough:
- Arrival and departure date: the basis for every calculation of extra nights.
- Type of accommodation: congress hotel in the block, another hotel or private accommodation.
- Accompanying persons: number of companions, ideally through a companion ticket type.
- Interest in pre- or post-congress tours: shown only to delegates who stay longer than the programme.
- Consent for destination offers: a separate, optional opt-in for information from the DMO.
Make all five optional and keep them on one screen. Together they take less than a minute, and conditional display keeps the form short for delegates who fly in and out on congress days.
The last field matters for data protection. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the organiser collects the data and may share personal data with the DMO only on a clear legal basis, usually explicit consent. Without consent, the DMO receives aggregated figures: how many delegates extended, by how many nights, with how many companions. For most reporting purposes, that is all the bureau director needs.
Converve’s registration module uses customisable forms with conditional questions and several ticket types. Arrival, departure and companion questions can sit in the same form that builds the attendee profiles used later for meeting planning, so nobody has to ask delegates twice.
How to measure extensions together
With those fields filled in, the calculation is simple enough to agree on before the congress. That agreement is the actual work. Organiser and DMO should settle the definitions in writing, so that both report the same number afterwards.
Shared measurement
Counting bleisure in five steps
- Step 1 Define congress nights Agree which nights count as congress nights, for example the programme nights plus one arrival night.
- Step 2 Collect dates Arrival, departure and accommodation type as optional fields in the registration form.
- Step 3 Calculate extra nights Stay length minus congress nights, per delegate who answered, then projected to all delegates.
- Step 4 Add companions Companion nights separately, because companions spend on leisure from the first day.
- Step 5 Check after the event One question in the post-event survey: did you stay longer than planned, and for how many nights?
A worked example shows the scale. Take a congress with 2,000 delegates, of whom 1,200 answer the date questions. If 40 per cent of them stay two nights beyond the congress nights, that is 960 extra nights in the sample, or about 1,600 when projected to all delegates. Add 300 companions who stay four nights each, and the destination counts another 1,200 nights. The DMO then values those nights with the spending per night from its own visitor survey, instead of borrowing a number from another city.
Destinations that publish such figures gain credibility. Vienna, for example, reported for 2024 that meeting guests stayed 2.98 nights on average, compared with 2.3 nights for the average visitor to the city. Impact measurement in the meetings industry is moving towards common standards, as our outlook on MICE tourism trends for 2027 explains (MICE stands for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions). Extension nights are one of the easiest lines to standardise, because the raw data comes from a form the organiser runs anyway.
Now the bureau director can answer the committee. In this example, the congress produced around 2,800 nights beyond the congress nights, more than 40 per cent of them from companions, and the tour bookings from the registration form add a third figure. That is an argument for the next bid.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is bleisure travel?
Bleisure travel combines business and leisure on the same trip. Business travellers add private days before or after a work trip, or bring a partner or family along. For destinations, it shows up mainly as extra overnight stays and companion travel around congresses and trade shows.
How many business travellers extend their trips?
According to the Amex GBT and Ipsos study “Meet Tomorrow’s Business Travelers” (March 2025, 1,817 respondents in the UK and US), 62 per cent of business travellers have extended a work trip for leisure. In the Helsinki Congress Delegate Survey 2025, 66 per cent of delegates extended their stay after the congress.
What is the difference between pre- and post-congress tours and an accompanying person programme?
Pre- and post-congress tours take place before or after the congress and are open to delegates and companions, usually run by a local DMC. An accompanying person programme runs during the congress days for companions only, while the delegates attend sessions. Both add nights and spending, but they are planned and sold separately.
Which registration data do you need to measure bleisure?
Five optional fields are enough: arrival date, departure date, type of accommodation, number of accompanying persons and interest in pre- or post-congress tours. A separate consent field allows the DMO to send offers. Without consent, organisers share only aggregated figures with the DMO.
Can a convention bureau receive delegates’ registration data?
Only on a clear legal basis under the GDPR, which in practice usually means explicit consent from the delegate. The organiser remains responsible for the data. For impact reporting, aggregated figures such as extra nights per delegate and the share of companions are usually sufficient and do not require personal data.
Conclusion: plan the extra nights, then count them
Delegates already extend their trips, in Vienna, in Helsinki and almost anywhere a congress ends near a weekend. The challenge for destinations is to turn that demand into a coordinated plan and measurable results. Bleisure becomes a result when organiser and DMO choose dates together, offer tours and a companion programme, ask five questions at registration and agree on one way to count. The bureau director can then report extra nights with supporting data.
If you run a congress or a hosted buyer programme and want registration, profiles and rule-based meeting planning in one place, get in touch with Converve. Our solutions for tourism events show how DMOs and convention bureaus use the platform today.
