Frankfurt also has the most international destinations (just not volume).
(Probably not Dubai, considering a few speakers would be thrown out at the border - or worse if they get though. It's also artificially inflated because it's almost all transit traffic).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_in...
Dubai is a center for large conferences and Expos.
The row of High rise hotels along Sheik Zayed Road across from Dubai World Trade Center (the largest exhibition hall in Dubai) is astounding.
Gitex, Gulfood and Arab Health are all conference that are largest in their class world wide.
And while A lot of DXBs traffic is transfers, the city does see 15 million international visitors a year, putting it in the top 5 most visited cities.
They can easily accommodate Def Con.
There’s a lot to criticize Dubai for, but they literally built the city to be a center for international conferences.
Aimed largely at the MENA, SAARC, and a bit of the APJ market.
Most DefCon attendees are in North America, which makes the flight to the UAE hellishly long and expensive.
Most attendees are also expensing the trip, so a $700-900 round trip ticket plus an additional $500-700 for hotels makes Managers balk, as that's a major expense coming out of your yearly budget.
Also, DefCon sponsors largely showed up because it was occuring around the same time and same location as BlackHat
Source: travelled a lot for corporate tech conferences in my PM days.
Terrible location for any conference that cares about everyone being able to attend. While one could argue about "hiding the gay" (I'd still say that's hard to impossible), I would never be able to attend as visibly trans.
Well, they literally enslaved foreign men to work as indentured workers, stripping their human rights, in order to build the city...