About
I’m Mertcan Tekin. I work in event management, recreation management and destination development: congresses and corporate events, destination communication, and the management and programming of recreation areas.
Most of what I know I learned on projects rather than in courses. Congresses and incentive groups, destination management companies, hotel sales teams, hostess agencies, organization companies, municipal event calendars. It is a business that still runs largely on relationships, phone calls and solving things at the last minute.
What I do today
I’m a member of the board at Choro Grup – Avcıoğlu A.Ş., a group that works in tourism, event management and energy.
I’m also one of the co-founders of Flex Event, an agency that offers communication, event management, event project development and event design to institutions and brands. There I’m on the supplier side: we write the proposals, work from the client’s brief and follow a project through to the day it is delivered.
Through both roles I work with institutions, brands and local governments on communication and destination communication, on events, and on recreation areas and how they are run.
Where I have worked before
During my university years I was the general president for universities of the Young Tourism Professionals Association (Genç Turizmciler Derneği), which brought together tourism students from different universities.
Later I worked as Director of Operations at Global Tourism Forum, an international meeting with keynotes, panels, one to one meetings and closed sessions. I held the same title at INFLOW Network, the team behind the INFLOW Summit.
In both roles I was on the client side: requesting proposals, comparing agencies, choosing who we would work with and checking on the day that what had been promised was delivered. Having sat on both sides of that table helps me a lot in my work at Flex Event.
From 2019 to 2023 I served on the board of I-MICE, an association of the meetings and events industry, and I’m still a member of its Education Commission.
I also served as Secretary General of the Marmara Traditional Sports Federation (Marmara Ata Sporları Federasyonu).
Industry and university
I sit on the Advisory Board of the Tourism Research Center at Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University. The university grew out of Gazi University, its tourism faculty is the oldest in the country, and most of the people who teach tourism today studied there.
At the university and in the I-MICE Education Commission, the same question keeps coming up: what young people expect when they choose tourism or events as a career, and what they find when they start. I’m interested in narrowing that gap, because our industry relies heavily on young and temporary staff.
Why I write
I write about how events, recreation and destinations depend on each other: the practical side of events, the place of recreation in a city’s life, and what makes a destination worth living in as well as visiting. The examples come from projects I know. Where I think the industry has bad habits, I say so.