Field note · August 2026

Why I'm Starting Narrower Than "MICE"

Every connector who touches South American hospitality eventually says the same word: MICE. Meetings, incentives, conferences, exhibitions. It sounds like a category. It is actually four different buyers wearing the same badge, and treating them as one market is why so many platforms in this space stall at "interesting deck, no volume."

An incentive travel planner and a conference organizer are not the same counterparty. One is booking a reward trip for a sales team that hit quota — 40 to 150 people, high per-person spend, a property that can hold the group exclusively and run the ground logistics without a hitch. The other is filling a convention center. Different budget, different lead time, different definition of a good property. Bundling them into "MICE" is how a supplier ends up fielding RFPs that were never going to close.

The market has already drawn this line for me — I just have to stand on the right side of it.

An existing MICE marketplace already treats international incentive and meeting planners as the explicit buyer side, and LATAM hotels, DMCs, convention bureaus, and venues as the explicit supplier side. That's not a hypothesis I'm testing. It's a structure someone else already proved holds volume. My move is to go narrower inside it — North American incentive planners specifically, independent luxury hotels and DMCs specifically — where a generalist marketplace has no reason to specialize and a broad connector has no edge.

Narrow isn't a smaller business. It's the only way to actually know both sides well enough to make an introduction the buyer trusts on the first email.

— Abeiene Nejar connects North American incentive planners with independent luxury South American hotels and DMCs.