New suite at the EICC gets the royal treatment

Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal has officially opened the new Lennox Suite of the recently expanded Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC). The venue’s £30 million expansion has been designed to keep Edinburgh at the forefront of the global meetings and events marketplace.

The EICC first opened its doors in 1995 and was opened officially a year later by Her Majesty The Queen. Since that time more than one million delegates have travelled to the city to attend, mostly, international conferences and events. Today, an invited audience of leading meetings industry professionals witnessed the Royal opening event, for the Lennox Suite.  The event was also attended by Lord Lieutenant and Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh, The Rt. Hon. Donald Wilson and Scottish Government Minister for Business, Energy and Tourism, Fergus Ewing MSP.

Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal performed the ceremony at the Lennox Suite by initiating a computer-controlled sequence of changes to the Suite’s revolutionary hall-wide moving floor system. The moving floor enables a space the size of four tennis courts to be transformed from flat-floored exhibition space, to a tiered theatre for 2,000 delegates or a performance arena for 1,400 spectators in a fraction of the time required in conventional event spaces.

Speaking at the event EICC Chief Executive, Marshall Dallas announced the venue’s latest initiative ‘InnovationNation’: a yearlong programme of free public lectures created to celebrate innovation in Edinburgh and Scotland.

“We attract scientists, business people and leading thinkers from around the world to meetings and events at the EICC. In 2015 we look forward to sharing our expanded venue with a local audience through a series of free public lectures, which have been designed to highlight Scotland as a nation of innovation,” said Dallas.

Commenting on Scotland’s place in the global meetings industry Scottish Government Minister for Business, Energy and Tourism, Fergus Ewing MSP said:

“We will work together with the industry to leverage the reputation that Scotland has gained on the global stage into even greater returns for business tourism. Business tourism is a perfect example of how we can continue to export goods, people and ideas around the world and, at the same time, welcome ideas, innovation and people into our national culture.”

The expanded EICC is one the world’s most technologically advanced meetings and events spaces with a forward schedule of client events through to end 2020 set to deliver an economic impact in excess of £300 million in The City of Edinburgh.

Photos courtesy of Malcolm Cochrane Photography.