I spent part of a morning one day last week viewing a country club hotel in the Midlands. It had been a few years since I was last there, but primarily it was an opportunity to meet the sales director, an old friend. Hence it was a gossip as much as anything else. We started discussing the industry in general – me from a booking agent’s point of view and she from an hotelier’s point of view.
Had I been to Confex? She wanted to know. Confex is the major conference venue exhibition and showcase held for three days every spring in London and her hotel group had not exhibited for several years. The show has been getting smaller and smaller over the last few years and, despite attempts by the organisers to breathe new life into it with an extensive seminar programme. It looked smaller than ever this year, although there was plenty of champagne on offer. I thought it had been a big disappointment and that perhaps exhibitions such as this had run their course.
Exhibitions are no longer a forum for launching new ideas when you can do it a lot quicker and target your audience more effectively on the web at a fraction of the price. She agreed. She thought it was a circus dominated by industry ‘insiders’ that generated little genuine business and a lot of irritation to ‘outsiders’. It no longer attracted the major hotel groups. It was basically kept afloat by the local authority-run conference bureaux that form the nucleus of exhibitors and don’t appear to judge its benefits by the economics of the real world. We both agreed there was a need for some kind of face- to-face forum where buyer meets seller in a pleasant atmosphere to exchange ideas and business – perhaps there is a need to reinvent ‘the exhibition’ in a different format.
