Middle East insight
Postponed, not cancelled: Time to get back on the Gulf events plane
Iain Stirling, international portfolio director, Mash Media, reports on the recent Qatar Event Show and the industry’ s regional response to a challenging security situation
Postponed, not cancelled.”
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Of everything said on stage at the Qatar Event Show, that was the phrase that stayed with me.
It is a small distinction with large consequences. A cancelled show is revenue gone and a community dispersed. A postponed one is a logistics problem. Six months after Gulf airspace closed and the regional calendar fell over, the Middle East is dealing overwhelmingly with the second of those.
I spent three days in Doha at the second edition of the Qatar Event Show, moderating two sessions at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Centre( DECC). The first,‘ Venues at the centre of event ecosystems’, brought together Eng. Said Al Shanfari, chief executive officer of the Oman Convention and Exhibition Centre and chair of UFI’ s Middle East and Africa chapter, who becomes UFI president in 2027; Mahir Abdulkarim Julfar, executive vice-president of Dubai World Trade Centre; and our host, José Vicente, chief executive officer of Qatar Business Events Corporation. Three men who had just spent six months rebuilding their calendars in real time.
The year moved rather than disappeared Vicente was candid about the spring. Asked the same question in March or April, he said he would not have known what to tell anyone. DECC’ s largest jewellery show, almost entirely international, was postponed and has been slotted back in at the end of September, with build-up already started. Smaller events moved into
Above: Iain Stirling
2027. A handful of first-time events fell away altogether.
And yet his summary of 2026 was that, in revenue terms, Qatar expects to end the year roughly as though nothing had happened, even if the calendar looks nothing like the one signed off in January.
The same picture emerged in Oman, where Al Shanfari reported the domestic programme growing by over 15 % across the year. The venue leaned hard into local and government business, sport, consumer shows and weddings, and recorded its busiest summer. The loss was concentrated in one place: international association congresses, controlled by PCOs and associations outside the region.
Dubai took a significant share of the rescheduled shows, and Julfar said DWTC was fortunate to have the Dubai Exhibition Centre available to absorb them. That brought an unexpected benefit. With mega events spread across two sites and the wider city rather than clustered around the Trade Centre, hotel demand spread too, out towards Jumeirah Beach Residence and the Palm, and exhibitors have been getting better rates as a result.
That is the first takeaway for anyone weighing the region. Capacity was not the constraint this year. The industry had somewhere to put the business.
Insurance the real bottleneck Where the disruption genuinely bit was international attendance, and the cause is cover rather than confidence.
Julfar did not soften it. The past six months, he said, created economic damage for the industry. Smaller shows replaced some of the mega events,“ but the P & L will never be the same”. Exhibitions and conferences are what generate revenue for the city as well as the venue, and they were the ones exposed.
The obstacle was insurance. With travellers unable to secure cover for the region, DWTC worked directly with the airlines instead. Emirates and
36 Issue 5 2026 www. exhibitionworld. co. uk