Tradeshows as commercial warfare

On day one of the inaugural Australian Events Expo, the organisers were touting a 40 per cent increase in visitor pre-registrations compared to the last Sydney on Sale, which the expo replaced. But as Robby Clark from ETF pointed out in his seminar, only half of pre-registered visitors show up. He also branded some recent trade shows as little more than "commercial warfare", offering competing companies a venue to "spy, try and buy".

Was this your experience of Australian Events Expo? How did the show compare to AIME in terms of generating business, and will you be back next year?

Can Sydney cope?

According to a recent Sydney Morning Herald report, Sydney’s business community will gain next to nothing from hosting the APEC Leaders Summit in September. This announcment does seem a little dramatic, given the certain windfall for hotels and security companies like Thales, not to mention the big business leaders who are actually invited to join the APEC discussions.

The concern, though, is for those small businesses directly affected by the lockdown of the CBD and the subsequent mass exodus during the public holiday in September.

Yet the biggest loser in all this is surely the meetings industry, which has been shut out altogether.

Instead of drawing on PCOs and meetings professionals, the APEC events are being handled entirely by the APEC 2007 Taskforce, a division of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

We’d like to hear from you – will APEC be a good thing for Sydney? Would the meetings industry do a better job than the government taskforce or is this just another example of a major event bypassing our industry?

‘Wow’ destinations

As the C&I footprint now covers practically every corner of the globe, an unexpected byproduct has been that many destinations are starting to look alike. For example, Macau is marketing itself as an "Asian Las Vegas" with the same monster hotels, casinos and over-the-top developments. All this homogeneity has led to a backlash, with C&I companies scouring the earth for destinations with a distinctive local flavour. Parts of China, South America, Africa and India (pictured, a polo elephant in Dera Amer, Jaipur are on the cusp of major change, especially in infrastructure and services for the industry.

India in particular has undergone near-Olympian economic transformation, moving from struggling Third World country to budding superpower in a matter of decades. Yet it is still challenging and chaotic and eye-opening – all part of its appeal. Which destinations have wowed you lately? Are clients open to new experiences? Or is it better to simply meet their expectations rather than challenging them?