Beyond interchangeability: A viewpoint on defensible term choice in business event tourism research

Events tourism, MICE tourism, and business tourism are frequently used in overlapping ways in tourism and event scholarship. This viewpoint focuses solely on studies concerning business events, which include conferences, congresses, conventions, exhibitions, meetings, incentives, and other similar professional events rather than discussing all forms of events tourism. This overlap is not necessarily problematic, since conferences, exhibitions, incentive trips, and hybrid business events may legitimately contain event-related, MICE-related, and business-travel dimensions. The more significant problem is that the choice of term is not always justified in relation to the research question, the phenomenon under study, the actors being foregrounded or the unit of analysis. Term choice should be viewed as a matter of methodological positioning, not wording only. It suggests a concise decision logic based on four criteria: primary purpose, dominant stakeholder logic, primary analytical object, and evaluative criterion. The intention is not to police terminology or to deny real-world hybridity but to help authors make clearer and more defensible choices when selecting events tourism, MICE tourism or business tourism as the dominant label. Such clarity can support stronger manuscript positioning and fairer review.