Built, checked and adjusted every day — not a directory frozen in time
MICE is the open, continuously maintained reference for New Zealand’s Meetings, Incentives, Conferences & Events. It grows, modifies and corrects itself daily, cross-references everything it holds, and stays free to everyone who uses it.
Most industry directories are published once and then slowly go out of date. A listing is entered, a phone number is typed in, a category is chosen, and from that moment the entry begins to drift away from reality. Venues change hands. Restaurants close. Operators rebrand. New suppliers open their doors and never get added. MICE was built to work the opposite way. It is a living national record — a reference that is added to, corrected, cross-checked and adjusted every single day, so that what you read is as close as practically possible to what is true on the ground right now.
The idea is simple, but the discipline behind it is what makes the difference. Instead of treating the database as a finished product, we treat it as something that is never finished. It is closer to a national reference that is continuously kept alive than to a printed guide that ages the day it is released. That single decision — to grow and modify constantly rather than publish and forget — shapes everything else about how MICE works.
The first thing that sets MICE apart is that nothing sits in isolation. An event is connected to the venue that hosts it. That venue is connected to the function spaces inside it, to the hotels and beds nearby, to the caterers and audio-visual suppliers who service it, and to the transport operators who move people to and from it. Look at a venue and you can see the events it holds and the things to do around it. Look at a city and you can see its venues, its restaurants, its suppliers and its activities together.
This cross-referencing is what turns a list of names into a genuinely useful planning tool. When you are organising a conference, an incentive or a corporate day out, you are never dealing with a single supplier in a vacuum. You are assembling a chain of them. MICE reflects that reality by linking the record together so the connections are already drawn for you, rather than leaving you to rebuild them from a dozen separate searches.
The second difference is location. Restaurants, transport and activities are geo-located, which means they are placed in the physical context of the venues and cities they sit beside. A restaurant is not just an entry in a restaurants list — it is somewhere near the venue you are already looking at. A team-building activity is not buried in its own category — it appears among the options that are genuinely nearby.
For anyone planning an event, geography is not a detail; it is often the deciding factor. Delegates need to eat close to where they meet. Incentive groups want experiences within easy reach of their accommodation. Organisers need transport that connects the pieces without long, awkward transfers. By anchoring listings to real coordinates and showing what is nearby, MICE answers the question people are actually asking: not just “what exists?” but “what works together, here?”
The third difference is that MICE reads ratings directly from Google, Yelp and Tripadvisor, per location, and refreshes them. Rather than inventing a private scoring system that no one recognises, we surface the signals people already trust, drawn from the platforms where they leave their honest opinions. A profile shows what the wider public is saying about that specific place, gathered from independent sources and dated so you know how recent it is.
This matters because reputation moves. A venue that was excellent three years ago may have slipped; a restaurant that reopened under new management may have transformed. Ratings that are read afresh and re-checked keep the record honest in a way that a one-time editorial verdict never could. We show the numbers as they stand and note when they were last reviewed, so the picture is current rather than historical.
Behind the scenes, MICE runs constant checks, amendments and updates. Automated sweeps work through the record every day: discovering suppliers that are missing, correcting details that have changed, re-verifying entries that already exist, refreshing ratings, and quietly retiring listings that are no longer real. The goal is that the record heals and improves on its own schedule, rather than waiting for someone to notice a problem and fix it by hand.
No automated system is perfect, and we are deliberately cautious. When there is genuine doubt about whether a business has closed, for example, the safer course is to flag the uncertainty rather than erase a listing that may still be trading. But the direction of travel is always the same: every day the record should be a little more complete, a little more accurate and a little more current than it was the day before.
While a great deal happens automatically, the people who know a business best are the people who run it. That is why any venue or supplier can claim their listing and then update, modify and enrich it directly. They can correct the details, add the spaces and capacities, describe what they offer, and in doing so increase both the accuracy of the record and their own visibility within it.
Crucially, this is free. We do not charge owners for the right to keep their own information correct, and we do not make visibility something that has to be bought. Money does not buy placement or trust on MICE. A claimed, well-maintained, owner-verified listing rises because it is more complete and more trustworthy — not because someone paid for it to be pushed to the top.
The fourth defining principle is openness. MICE is free to the public, and we do not limit information or access. There is no paywall to read a profile, no membership required to see the full listings, and no throttling that hides the good detail behind a subscription. Whether you are a professional planner, a company organising its annual conference, or an individual arranging a single event, you see the same complete record.
This is a deliberate contrast with membership-only models, where the most useful information is reserved for paying insiders. We believe a national reference is most valuable when it is genuinely national — available to everyone who needs it. An open horizon of information serves the whole industry better than a walled garden that serves only its members.
Because MICE covers the full spectrum of what an event needs, it supports end-to-end planning. Venues and function spaces, hotels and beds, restaurants, caterers, audio-visual and production, event equipment, transport, team-building and activities, professional conference organisers, destination management companies and incentive specialists all live in the one record. You can move from choosing a room to feeding your delegates to moving them around a city without leaving the reference.
We do not claim to hold every option that exists, and we do not pretend the options we hold are the only ones worth considering. What we aim to provide is a very open horizon — a broad, cross-linked view of the choices that may be required to plan an event well, so that fewer possibilities are missed and the whole picture can be seen in one place.
Taken together, these principles describe something that behaves less like a directory and more like a living record. It grows. It adjusts. It corrects itself. It reflects independent ratings, real locations and real connections. It invites the businesses within it to keep their own entries honest, and it stays open to everyone who wants to use it. It is not a members-only website that trades access for fees; it is a shared national reference that becomes more authoritative the more it is maintained.
Trust only means something if you can tell how far it has been earned. MICE uses staged verification tiers so the confidence behind every entry is visible. A Listedentry has been discovered and is awaiting verification. A Corroborated entry has been cross-checked across independent sources. An Owner-verified entry has been confirmed by the business itself. Nothing is presented as more certain than it actually is, and the path from discovered to confirmed is shown openly rather than hidden.
This staged approach is how we balance breadth with honesty. Being comprehensive means listing things before every last detail has been confirmed; being trustworthy means never disguising that fact. The tiers let us do both — casting a wide net while telling you exactly how thoroughly each entry has been checked.
We want to be clear about the limits of all this. MICE provides a very open horizon of information on all levels, but we do not warrant or undertake to say that the options shown are the only choices or the best choices. We are a reference, not a booking agent, and not a guarantor of any third party’s services. Venues change, close or alter what they offer, and such matters are beyond our control. We do not guarantee any services provided by any party listed here.
The right way to use MICE is as a strong, current, cross-linked starting point: to discover the options, understand how they connect, see what people are saying, and then confirm the details directly with the providers themselves before you commit. Used that way, a living national record that is checked and adjusted every day is a genuinely powerful tool — one that keeps working for you long after a static directory would have gone quietly out of date.