Eventum Premo recently visited Barcelona at one of the most famous travel forums, EIBTM, which focuses on organizing conferences, seminars and business meetings, corporate tourism and special events. The venue for EIBTM 2010, as in previous years, is one of Barcelona's most prestigious exhibition centers - Gran Via Fira. Every year (since 1988), the EIBTM exhibition attracts 3,000 exhibitors from 100 countries and 8,000 visitors, of which more than 4,000 are professionals.
EIBTM Visitors are the decision makers responsible for organizing business travel, meetings, and conferences. Exhibitors are more often representatives of hotels, and sometimes entire countries, less often companies-organizers of events. In general, this forum presents not so much individual chains of hotels or services, but entire areas and countries from European to the most exotic. For example, the UK was represented by the community www.visitlondon.com, representing the entire destination. This year, the stands of Russia occupied a large exposition at the forum, a separate stand was allocated to Moscow and St. Petersburg - “two mice capitals”. Unfortunately, despite the truly competitive advantages, Russian hotels still cannot offer a quality alternative to the Turkish service when it comes to visiting conferences for groups of 500 people or more. But for smaller groups there were many interesting suggestions.
In addition to beautiful design stands dedicated to countries, a prominent place on the forum was occupied by a publishing house representing the interests of the event industry and offering visitors a lot of publications and reference books in the field of event management. It is difficult to assess how much higher the level of events in Barcelona is, but the level of professional press is very different from Moscow.
Among the projects presented at the EIBTM 2010 exhibition, the Hosted Buyers program (Professional Buyer), which includes not only many benefits and discounts, but also makes it possible to attend special educational seminars held within the framework of the forum, can be singled out separately. The program aims to establish direct business contacts and expand cooperation between companies specializing in this area.
The EIBTM Forum provides an opportunity not only to establish new business contacts, but also to easily process them: each exhibitor rents special scanners from the organizers of the exhibition, allowing them to receive bar code information from any badge and download the questionnaire filled out by the visitor on the site. It eliminates the many-hour analysis of business cards and allows you to collect a database of potential customers, unique in completeness of information. By the way, more than 30 stands were devoted to new technologies for conferences and events - various scanning and interactive voting systems. The latest developments allow conference participants using a miniature device not only to vote for certain speaker proposals, but also offer separate internal networks for communication for participants, the ability to exchange electronic business cards via Bluetooth, clarify the presence of partners and colleagues in the hall, download broadcast presentations and ask questions to the speaker online.
