The Oman Society of Lipid & Atherosclerosis (OSLA) has won the bid to host the Triennial International Symposium on Atherosclerosis in 2024 in Muscat, Oman – bringing the Ministry of Tourism of Oman closer to targeting 11m visitors by 2040.

The announcement was made during the General Assembly of the International Atherosclerosis Society (IAS) at the ISA 2018 (the XVIIIth International Symposium on Atherosclerosis) in Toronto, Canada, 9-12 June.

First held in 1967 in Chicago, the ISA’s recent editions were held in Sydney, Australia and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The 19th edition will be held in Kyoto, Japan in 2021. The 20th edition be the first time the conference is hosted in the Middle East, and is expected to bring 2,500 delegates over three days.

The 2024 conference will be held at Oman’s Convention & Exhibition Centre (OCEC), which includes a 3,200-person theatre, 22,000sqm exhibition space and 55 meeting spaces.

Led by Dr Khalid Al Rasadi, president and Dr Fahad Al Zadjali, secretary of OSLA, the winning team competed against Dubai, St Petersburg and New Delhi. The winning team included Khalid Al Zadjali, director of the Oman Convention Bureau (OCB) and Gillian Taylor, director of business development, OCEC. Al Rasadi said: “Bringing this international conference with global experts and having them share their knowledge will benefit not just Oman but also all of the GCC and surrounding countries.”

“The symposium will bring direct, indirect and induced economic benefits to the Sultanate in addition to the strategic impact such an event has on the country,” Al Zadjali stated. “‘Business Events’ is one of the key target markets as, typically, they bring 2-3 times more economic value to a country than leisure travellers,” Al Zadjali added.

The local association market in Oman is strong, especially in the fields of healthcare, heritage, culture and tourism, infrastructure and logistics. The number of association meetings in Oman has doubled in 2017 as recorded by the International Congress and Convention Association’s (ICCA’s) recently released statistics and Oman is now placed second in the Middle East and 86th in the world for the number of international meetings hosted in 2017.