Cuba - The organiser of the MITM Americas, (Meetings, and Incentive Travel Market) put up the ‘full’ signs for hosted buyer registration three months before the exhibition started in November.
In its 15th year, the show was held for the first time in Havana, Cuba and attracted over 200 hosted buyer applications from 16 countries from Europe, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and the US, Organiser GSAR Marketing granted half of them.
“MITM has to stop accepting hosted buyers applications to attend MITM Americas for the simple reason that we had more buyers than exhibitors,” says GSAR Marketing’s president, Ramon Alvarez. “This would be good for exhibitors but is not great for MITM business since we set the exhibiting prices based on the ratio of hosting one buyer per one exhibitor.”
Alvarez says that the limitation of 100 Latin American and Caribbean exhibitors to 100 buyers is based on the difficult experience they have had in getting more than 100 “truly” good meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions buyers to attend any kind of travel trade show.
“We choose the buyers based of their potential to give business to our exhibitors. They are those that have or are able to hold events in the Americas,” Alvarez adds.
MITM programmed 2,620 one-to-one meetings between exhibitors and visitors.
Photo: twicepix
