Industrial networking needed

But I did make it to a presentation given by the organisers in London recently. The Mesago organisation runs a number of exhibitions in Nuremberg, as well as in other venues, but the biggest is SPS Drives. Visitor numbers have peaked at about 60,000, and the organisers – perhaps surprisingly – do not see it increasing further.

SPS Drives is an excellent European exhibition, and out of that attendance 60,000, it was surprising to learn that only 321 visitors travelled from the UK (it would have been 322 had I made it!), representing a paltry 2.4% of the total audience. Why such a poor turnout?

According to Bernhard Ruess, Director Communication, and his colleagues, speaking on London, one of the most acute problems appears to be transportation. There are precious few direct flights to Nuremberg from the UK, and changing flights in Dusseldorf or Munich is fraught with difficulty, as the CDA team found the previous year, when the connecting flight was belatedly cancelled, leaving us with  two-hour drive in the snow!

To drive all the way takes seven hours from Calais, a bit far for a couple of days at a show (though I have done it!), and there aren’t any sensible rail routes either – this year, I was thinking of going directly by rail from Paris, and even that is tricky. And if and when you get there, it’s not all that easy to find affordable accommodation, although to the north there are some good cities to stay in, but the drive to Nuremberg is quite difficult, owing to congestion.

Unlike Hannover, it somehow hasn’t proved possible to reach an accommodation with local transport authorities to offer free travel for attendees to exhibitions. A similar arrangement is in place at the Amex Stadium in Brighton, where rail travel - from as far as Hayward Heath to the north and Lewes to the west - is included with every football ticket. Schemes like this contribute hugely to reduce visitor difficulties.

Although SPS Drives is the largest B2B show at Nuremberg, there are consumer shows which are bigger, and which must face similar issues. It is time for all the parties - airlines, local transport companies and exhibition organisers - to get together – and work together. What about charter flights? Block-booked accommodation with pre-arranged transport? A longer show? Surely time for some networking on an industrial scale!