The appointment book is the program
ATEC Meeting Place 2026 runs Monday 26 to Wednesday 28 October 2026 in Hobart. ATEC dates the event there, and Tourism Tasmania supports it. Tasmania hosts Meeting Place for the first time.
Buyers and sellers meet in pre-scheduled appointments across the three days. The commercial output of the week runs through that schedule.
Three sessions, twenty appointments each
ATEC runs three B2B sessions. Sessions A and B fall on Tuesday 27 October, and Session C falls on Wednesday 28 October.
Each session holds 20 meetings. A meeting runs 10 minutes, and the changeover between meetings runs one minute.
Buyers attend all three sessions and can receive up to 60 meetings. Sellers attend two of the three and can receive up to 40. A buyer with a full book holds 11 hours of appointment time.
Sellers keep one designated table for the whole program and buyers move between them. ATEC bars pull-up banners on the B2B floor.
The schedule follows preferencing. Buyers list the sellers they want, and sellers list the buyers they want. ATEC builds the schedule after registrations close. The sessions a delegate receives are system-generated and cannot be changed. The number of preferences a delegate submits carries no guarantee of a match.
The published clocks
Session A opens at 8:00 a.m. and closes at 12:25 p.m. on Tuesday, with registration from 7:15 a.m. Session C runs the same window on Wednesday.
That 265-minute block holds 220 minutes of meetings and 45 minutes of morning tea.
Session B runs 1:15 p.m. to 5:40 p.m. on Tuesday, with afternoon tea inside the window. The at-a-glance event program dates both Tuesday sessions from 8:30 a.m. and carries no separate afternoon start.
Supplier sessions run alongside the B2B meetings on Wednesday, 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at Princes Wharf No.1.
The week around the appointments
Registration and the official welcome run at Princes Wharf No.1 from 8:30 a.m. on Monday. The curated networking experiences leave at 10:30 a.m. and return between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m.
ATEC divides delegates into five groups of 80 to 100 people, each a mix of buyers, sellers and industry partners. The venues sit up to 45 minutes from Hobart, and the return transfers run from and to Princes Wharf No.1.
The welcome function runs at MONA on Monday evening, hosted by Tourism Tasmania. Departure is about 5:30 p.m. from Brooke Street Pier, and the return runs from 8:30 p.m.
The gala dinner and the Tourism Export Awards close the event at Princes Wharf No.1 on Wednesday from about 6:30 p.m.
Four nights on the buyer side
Buyer registration includes four nights of accommodation with breakfast. Check-in is Sunday 25 October and check-out is Thursday 29 October. Pre-famils return to Hobart on 25 October, which puts the Sunday night inside the trip.
Seller registration excludes accommodation, transfers and flights. ATEC tells sellers to arrive on 25 October and depart on 29 October.
Thirteen Hobart properties post delegate rates on the MP26 accommodation page. Ten quote a percentage off the best available rate, six at 20 percent and four at 15 percent. Crowne Plaza Hobart quotes from 340 dollars a night. Several offers need a promo code at booking.
What a place costs
Buyer registration ran 1,699 dollars for a primary delegate and 1,399 dollars for an additional delegate, excluding GST. Primary and additional buyers each hold their own B2B schedule.
Seller registration ran 2,299 dollars for a primary delegate and 1,599 dollars for an additional delegate. An additional seller shares the primary seller's schedule.
Tourism Tasmania offers buyers a flight subsidy of up to 400 dollars excluding GST, reimbursed within 21 days of the end of MP26 against receipts.
Buyer registration closed at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday 16 August 2026. Seller registration closed at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday 19 July 2026.
The conference line
The conference runs at the Theatre Royal on Wednesday 28 October, 1:45 p.m. for a 2:00 p.m. start and a 5:45 p.m. close.
Robin Mack, managing director of Tourism Australia, opens on the tourism landscape. Rod Cuthbert, Viator's founder, takes 30 years of distribution and the change artificial intelligence may bring next. Kathryn O'Brien, Tourism Australia's executive general manager for global markets, leads a session on purchase paths across China, North America, Europe and emerging markets. Six operators debate trade against direct booking. Dr Lila Landowski closes on stress, resilience and adaptation.
Where the delegate figure comes from
Tourism Tasmania published the delegate figure on 30 October 2025. That page reads more than 500 delegates, including around 120 travel buyers active in the USA, UK, Greater China, Singapore and New Zealand.
Travel Daily reported the event on 16 October 2026 and wrote in the past tense. The event had not opened on that date, and no counted attendance exists yet.
Peter Shelley, ATEC's managing director, gave Travel Daily the purpose: the event "gives our industry the opportunity to do business but also step back and understand what is changing and what that means for the future."