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MICE Tourism is a segment of the tourism industry that deals with the organisation of Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions, which are experiencing a major process of disintermediation. This article applies the principal-agent problem in the theory of agency to analyse MICE disintermediation. It uses a dominant/sequential qual-QUAN mixed methods approach. Firstly, through interviews with MICE professionals to validate the research variables, test sample and questionnaire. Then, quantitative research using a survey sent to 365 MICE stakeholders in Europe. The opinions of hoteliers were compared with those of other MICE stakeholders to analyse disintermediation and determine the role of hoteliers in this new scenario. Our findings confirm a trend of partial disintermediation in which hotel bookings are the most disintermediated service and hoteliers are the stakeholders that pose a more proactive and aggressive attitude towards disintermediation. This paper is of interest for MICE stakeholders to better understand their position in the value chain and interpret the process of disintermediation. Its originality is based on the fact that it gathers the opinions of all MICE agents with a special focus on the perspective of its most dominant actor: the hotel.

There have been widespread expressions of dissatisfaction among autistic people and communities regarding the recommendations of the Lancet Commission on the future of care and clinical research in autism.1 The authors of this article discussed the Commission’s report and some wider issues related to autism research in general as a committee of autistic people, the Global Autistic Task Force on Autism Research, comprising autistic professionals and representatives of organisations run by and for autistic people, focusing on advocacy, service provision, education and participatory research. The Commission has been addressed in an open letter that drew attention to some of the points also discussed in this article.

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