Inside Barcelona’s Events Industry: A Learning Walk at Torre Melina and Catalunya Congress Centre
There is only so much that a classroom can teach about the events industry. At some point, you have to walk into a venue, speak to the people running it, and see how it all works from the inside. That is exactly what students on ESEI’s Master in Tourism and Hospitality Management did recently, as part of the Event Management and MICE Tourism module led by ESEI Professor Elena Altemir.
The visit took them to two of Barcelona’s key venues in the professional events space: the Catalunya Congress Centre and Torre Melina Gran Meliá. Guiding them through the experience was Anna Bayarri, Director of Sales at Torre Melina and a hospitality professional with over 20 years of experience in sales and marketing.
Learning How to Read a Venue
The centrepiece of the visit was learning how to conduct a professional site inspection, a skill that sits at the heart of event planning but is rarely taught in depth.
A site inspection is more than a tour. It is a structured evaluation of whether a venue can realistically support the goals of a specific event. Under Anna Bayarri’s guidance, students learned how event professionals look beyond the surface of a space and assess it on practical grounds: how attendees will move through it, how the operational logistics stack up, and whether the infrastructure genuinely matches what a client needs.
Approaching the visit through this professional lens gave students a working framework they can carry forward into their careers.
Understanding the MICE Sector Up Close
The visit also gave students a clear picture of how integrated venues operate within the global MICE sector, a term that covers Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions.
At Catalunya Congress Centre, students moved through a range of event spaces, from large plenary halls to smaller breakout rooms, examining how each was designed to serve different formats and audiences. They considered how an international conference might use the space differently from a corporate workshop, and what operational factors shape those decisions.
The relationship between the Congress Centre and Torre Melina Gran Meliá, part of Meliá Hotels International, also illustrated something important: how hotels and convention centres work in tandem to create a joined-up experience for event organisers and their guests. Seeing that collaboration in action is the kind of thing that stays with you long after the visit ends.
Speaking the Industry’s Language
Every professional sector has its own vocabulary, and the MICE industry is no exception. Part of what the learning walk offered was immersion in the terminology and shorthand that event professionals use every day, the kind of language that appears in documentation, proposals and client communications across the world.
By observing how Anna Bayarri and the venue teams described spaces, technical requirements and operational flows, students began to absorb that vocabulary naturally. It is a small thing in isolation, but confidence with professional language matters when you are sitting across the table from a client or a venue manager for the first time.
How Venues Position Themselves in a Competitive Market
Beyond the operational content, the visit offered something equally valuable: insight into how a high-end venue thinks about its own positioning and how it communicates its value to clients.
Anna Bayarri spoke openly about how hospitality professionals present their venues in a competitive market, how they match what a venue genuinely offers against what a client actually needs, and how they manage the space between aspiration and reality. That commercial perspective is rarely covered in academic settings, and hearing it from someone with two decades of experience in the field gave it a weight that no case study can fully replicate.
A City Built for Business Events
Barcelona is consistently ranked among Europe’s leading destinations for international business events, and visits like this one show why. The city offers world-class infrastructure, deep hospitality expertise, and a density of experienced professionals who are often willing to open their doors to the next generation coming through.
For ESEI students, that proximity to industry is not incidental. It is built into how the school approaches learning. The Master in Tourism and Hospitality Management is designed around the idea that real experience, guided by real professionals, produces graduates who are genuinely ready for the work.
The learning walk at Torre Melina and Catalunya Congress Centre was one afternoon. But the skills, vocabulary and professional perspective that came out of it will carry these students a long way.
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