NEWS

Attendance on EIBTM, 2nd-4th December 2008, Barcelona

EIBTM 2008 proved itself as the leading exhibition for the conference, incentives, events, business travel and meetings industry, held in the fantastic Mediterranean city of Barcelona.

There were present destinations, products and services from 3,300 suppliers representing over 160 countries, with free extensive seminar programme and networking events - and record numbers of Trade Visitors and Hosted Buyers.

Among exibitors, The Best Solutions Team was present on the stand of Serbia, and had active roll in attraction of hosted buyers and agencies to region of South East Europe (SEE). During the exibition, catalogue SEEmice was presented as a main tool for event organizers and meeting planners for SEE.

For this region (SEE) the greatest interest have shown buyers and agencies from Russia, Finland, Greece, Poland, but also Sweden and other countries. The main advantages of SEE region for events are that is NEW destination, close to all major European cities, but still more economicaly payable.

Attendance on Exporama Show, 6th-9th December 2008, Athens

The first Business-to-Business event for the events in Greece and the wider Southeastern Europe proved to be a virtual communication platform and source of effective business contacts between sellers and buyers, industry suppliers and event managers.

Exporama Show is a small meeting event in size compare to other MICE events in Europe however we are happy with our attendance. We were the only one from Serbia and the region and had cuople of interesting meetings with agencies from Russia, Istanbul, Israel and Greece. We were representing meeting industry of Serbia and other countries and distributing the catalogue SEEmice.

There were present as exibitors: agencies (PCOs, DMCs, catering services), Exibition and Event Services, hotels with congress facilities, Associations (Convention Birou of Thessaloniki, Convention Birou of Athens, MPI)etc.

Visitors were mostly from Greece, Rhodos, Crete, Turkey, Russia, Cyprus etc.

Every day there were organized seminars.

We also met at Exporama some visitors that we had opportunity to met on EIBTM, too.

The exhibition started around 11.00 and continued until 20.00. Everyday, a musical performance took place with a cocktail in order to entertain participants and had chance to increase communication between exhibitors and buyers.

However, Exporama Show for surely was hit (by number of visits and general impression) by violent protests (hundreds of professed anarchists that broke the windows of upscale shops, banks and five-star hotels in central Athens) which have taking place at that time.