GIBTM 2014 kicks off with 300 exhibitors

Over 250 regional and international buyers from 36 countries are attending the Gulf Incentive, Business Travel and Meetings Exhibition, or GIBTM 2014, in Abu Dhabi, with over 300 exhibitors putting up pavilions at the show.

The event was inaugurated by Shaikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Culture, Youth and Community Development.

Shaikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan at the opening of Gulf Incentive, Business Travel and Meetings Exhibition 2014 at Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre. — KT photo by Nezar Balout

The show, which is gaining popularity, has 74 brand-new exhibitors, with companies from Kazakhstan, Russia, Morocco, South Africa and South Korea making their debuts. The European Pavilion returns with 25 per cent more exhibitors.

After the official tour, the International Congress and Convention Association, or Icca, issued a statistics report revealing that the total number of regularly-occurring, internationally-rotating association meetings is increasing by 100 per cent each decade and has been consistently doing so for the last 50 years, with no signs of a slowdown.

Martin Sirk, chief executive officer of Icca, which is the largest global meetings industry association comprising almost 1,000 member companies and organisations in over 90 countries, said: “The Middle East joined the information revolution more recently than most regions, so it is not surprising to see some of the world’s fastest growth rates here, now that excellent meetings infrastructure has been developed, governments have created knowledge strategies to underpin their economic development agendas. We are confident that the region will enjoy even greater international meetings activity in the future, based on these underlying fundamentals.”

The report highlighted that between 1998 and 2002, there were 532 association meetings in the Middle East. That figure had grown to 905 between 2003 and 2007 and then expanded once again between 2008 and 2012 to 1,776 association meetings.

— haseeb@khaleejtimes.com