Feature
Streamlining
your event
At the latest EN Roundtable,
attendees were discussing
various ways to streamline
event processes and make
and most out of supplier and
venue relationships
T
he latest EN Roundtable kicks off at
Hilton Olympia on 15 August with the
question, what change have you made to an
event which you’ve found to be particularly
effective?
David Chappelle, group event director at
Northstar Travel Group, describes taking
over The Meetings Show two years ago, and
making the decision to reduce the number
of days from three to two.
“What was evident when I took over
the event was that the exhibitors had
been asking the previous team to consider
reducing it to two days,” he explains. “They
had always resisted because they’d launched
it as three days and felt committed to
making it work. We made the decision to
take it to two days and then looked at the
format and how we deliver value not only to
our visitors but also to our exhibitors.”
One of the ways the team went about
this was reformatting the show’s hosted
buyer programme; making it simpler and
creating a pre-show, buyer-led conference
to form part of the three-day hosted buyer
programme.
Nicola Heath and Chloe Hyland, from the
Messe Frankfurt UK team which organises
Automechanika Birmingham, describe the
show’s upcoming switch from annual to
biennial.
“The way Messe Frankfurt works is
that if you’re launching a new show it’ll
be every year for three years then it’ll go
biennial,” says Hyland. “Automechanika
36 — September
Frankfurt is the biggest show out of all
the Automechanika’s around the world
so companies in the UK can’t necessarily
spend money on Frankfurt and Birmingham
in the same year.”
Kimberley Barnes, event manager for
Clarion event Phacilitate, describes how
three years ago Phacilitate partnered with
another event in the US and the two began
running alongside each other.
“There were a lot of challenges with
that, you were bringing together two
different companies and audiences into
one venue,” she explains. “In the first year
we kept them separate – one upstairs, one
downstairs – and then in the second year we
branded it as though it was one event. From
customer feedback it was slightly confusing
to navigate, so this year we’re completely
bringing them into one event, with the same
“There’s nothing
worse than exhibitors
needing to cross a
hall to ask a really
menial question”
– Dean Wale