Ljubljana Food Crawl named Best 'Pop-Up' Event at the Conventa Best Event Awards 2025

The culinary journey "Ljubljana Food Crawl" took place last November as part of the Virtuoso Chairman’s Event Slovenia 2024, the annual gathering of Virtuoso, the world’s leading network for luxury and boutique tourism, attended by its top executives and most successful members. For one afternoon, the city transformed into a stage infused with flavors and culture.

Accompanied by guides, guests strolled through Ljubljana’s streets, stopping at carefully selected venues such as Bankarium, Kazina, the City Museum of Ljubljana, the pavilion on Kongresni Trg Square, and others. At each stop, they tasted the diversity of Slovenian cuisine and wines, discovered the remarkable architecture of the venues, and learned captivating stories of the country’s heritage and present-day life.

In this way, they experienced Ljubljana through its distinctive flavors, shaped into a holistic cultural encounter and enriched by direct contact with local people, which allowed them to gain a deeper, authentic impression of the city.

The event was organized by Ljubljana Tourism in cooperation with the Slovenian Tourist Board, the agency Luxury Slovenia DMC, the hotels InterContinental Ljubljana, Kempinski Palace Portorož, and Otočec Castle – Relais & Châteaux, as well as the Zagreb Tourist Board.

A total of 55 events from 10 different countries qualified for the finals of the Conventa Best Event Awards, across various categories. In the B2B category, 17 events competed, including four in the pop-up events category. According to the jury, this year’s competition reached the highest level of quality among submitted projects to date, confirmed by record-high scores (the average score of all projects was 7.14). This further establishes the competition as one of the most prestigious European event awards, whose mission is to foster professionalism, excellence, and effectiveness in event organization across Europe.

The finalists of the Conventa Best Event Awards were selected by a professional jury based on nine sets of criteria. Evaluation followed a unique three-level 80:20 model: the professional jury contributed 80% of the final score, while the professional audience at the Conventa Crossover event contributed the remaining 20%. The jury consisted of 24 international event industry experts, each with equal voting rights. Every jury member evaluated independently, drawing on their expertise, reputation, and authority. Each was entitled to raise comments, ask questions, and was required to justify their scoring.

The event “Ljubljana Food Crawl – A Journey of Flavors, Culture, and Stories” also won third place among Slovenian events, with six national events making it to the finals.