A recent UFI survey identified almost 1,200 venues with more than 5,000sqm at the end of 2011. With an average service life of 25-30 years, a large number of venues will be refurbished, expanded or rebuilt in the next few years. New venues are also planned for metropolitan areas without trade fair activities.
In this analysis of venue ideals, JWC’s Jochen Witt and Dr Gerd Weber demonstrate how a proper planning process can help to satisfy customer needs, reduce investment and operating costs and, ultimately, increase the ROI of the investor.
To be successful, any investment into new or existing venues must be based on an intensive planning process, which should be an integrated part of the corporate vision, mission and strategy.
Surprisingly, our experience of venue development is different. Management or governments frequently start the process directly with the selection of an architect and the architectural planning, the simple reason being that they want something with ‘a nice design’. This approach might be justified for those areas of a venue where form and function are equally important, such as areas that might define a venue, like entrances or boulevards. However the success of a venue does not depend primarily on its beauty, but on its functionality.
The rule ‘form follows function’ is more relevant in the trade fair industry than in many other industries. Deviation from this rule multiplies risk and frequently results in missing functions, inappropriate layouts, dimensions that do not conform to market, substandard international technical standards, and a lack of flexibility in conjunction with inappropriately high investment or operating costs.
To assess a venue’s competiveness and feasibility for the future, an integrated process is required, taking into account the strategy of the venue and/or organiser company, the relevant trade fair and congress market, the competitive situation, regional or local trends, and international standards in venue development. The assessment must be based on a thorough needs analysis of future customers (organiser, exhibitor, visitor). Typically, a different approach and process is applied for existing and new venues.
Existing venues
To assess the future competitiveness of existing venues, aspects such as the feasibility and attractiveness of the city or region for trade shows and congresses, the regional or national venue competition, and the range, quality and costs of services offered by the venue need to be evaluated.
The dimensions of the venue, equipment and general condition of the facilities, including safety and attractiveness as well as efficiency and flexibility, will have to be benchmarked against competitive venues and international standards. Typical mismatches we encounter include lower than required capabilities on the low electrical installations deployment; undersized congress or meeting facilities compared to exhibition space; unattractive or absent service areas for visitors and exhibitors (catering, restrooms). Additional commercial service offerings such as online information and registration or response time may be evaluated but are normally not part of a venue-focused assessment.
As a principle of critical importance, venue structures and services need to address the changing requirements of customers: With less and less time available, limited budgets and mostly clear ROI expectations, guest organisers, exhibitors, visitors and congress participants will appreciate venues that best facilitate lead generation, matchmaking, networking or education. Venues addressing these requirements through flexible, innovative and pleasant meeting experiences will have a competitive advantage over others. Of course it will be necessary to offer services including state-of-the-art IT and audiovisual technology, high-speed internet access and language interpretation facilities, but all these features are fairly common in today’s venues and do not really offer competitive advantages any longer.
Before planning any venue, it’s crucial to understand the type of customer you expect to use it. Once this is done, the core planning process is generally divided into four phases that comprise the work of the architects and project managers.
Phase 1 – Determining general layout
Two major types of trade fair venue layouts can be identified around the world.
Type A has a central concourse. The visitor enters the concourse via various entrances from one side of the concourse while the halls are located on the other side. The halls can normally be divided into segments. This type of venue layout is ideal for smaller venues with a high number of concurrent shows. Easy orientation and access for visitors and clear logistics processes for exhibitors at the backside of the halls characterise this layout type. ADNEC in Abu Dhabi
is an example of this type of venue.
Type B is more complex and well suited to larger shows (more than 60,000sqm). It also has a central concourse, but this time the halls are arranged on both sides. These layouts often offer larger areas between the halls to optimise logistics processes. Entrances for visitors are usually at both ends of the concourse. Larger venues of this type also offer additional entrances. This type of venue layout is very efficient for larger shows and those with heavy exhibition goods (examples: Madrid, Milano, Munich).
Phase 2 – Planning room types
To conduct exhibitions and congresses, a variety of room types is necessary. A typical but non-exhaustive list of spaces serving visitors or exhibitors includes bag storage, toilets and catering facilities, registration and ticketing areas, meeting rooms with different sizes, back-office functions like kitchen, storage and staff rooms as well as rooms for technical equipment. All of these have to be defined and listed with numbers, size and location. Based on this listing, the total space for the venue, divided into the areas ‘exhibition/congress’, ‘services’ and ‘back-office/technical’ is determined. A sophisticated planning process can optimise the use of space and result in significant reductions in investment costs. We have experienced variances in costs of up to 15 per cent when applying optimal planning processes.
Phase 3 – Functional specification
In this phase, a detailed specification for each identified room type needs to be defined. All technical installations and design levels have to be determined. This phase has a major impact on the budget. We often see identical designs for different kinds of rooms. It begs the question: Why should a room with no customer access have the same expensive design applied to an organiser’s office? On the other hand, various purpose-built technical rooms require varying special functionalities. For example, rooms destined to contain high-density IT equipment will need high cooling capacity, otherwise expensive subsequent facility upgrades will become necessary.
Advanced planning of functional specifications will avoid mistakes and reduce total investment costs.
Phase 4 – Time schedule and budget
The final step covers scheduling and budget planning. Realistic timing of the planning and construction phase is very important. A venue owner/manager must avoid opening a show while construction is still ongoing. The first show will of course be subject to critical observation by future customers and other critical stakeholders, so a smooth opening is very important. This is not just about the building, but includes the operations and services. They have to be planned and implemented long before the opening date. The marketing and acquisition phase should start long before the venue opens and has to be prepared well in advance.
For a new venue, a planning and construction period of four years including all above described phases is realistic.
The budget planning covers much more than the construction costs. Often the budgets for marketing and acquisition, the planning of operations and services and the start-up will be underestimated or even neglected altogether. A quarterly and eventually monthly update of all budgets is recommended.
Get experts involved from the outset
The output from these four phases feeds into the work of the architects, project managers and engineers to develop an attractive and functional venue. In our experience, many of these detailed recommendations will be challenged by planning teams or architects. This dialogue will help investors, management and planning teams to understand the logic and processes of the trade fair industry and develop a best-in-class venue.
To ensure customer needs and ROI are optimised, trade fair experts should be involved when it comes to the upgrade, extension or construction of a trade fair or congress venue. Use experts to conduct regular due diligence assessments of venues to check their efficiency, compatibility with future customer needs and compliance with safety standards, and you could deliver the world’s most desirable exhibition venue.
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Making room: new venue planning
Before starting any planning process for a new venue, some homework needs to be done.
Investors and management must determine what kind of trade fairs and/or congresses and other events (quality, size and quantity) are targeted to be held in the new venue.This in turn requires a thorough analysis of customer needs, a market analysis and a clear strategy.
As in the case of existing venues, an evaluation of the city or region as well as the competition is a prerequisite. The results of this work will strongly influence the profile of the future venue.
The development or extension of a venue needs to take into account many dimensions: Customer needs, markets, competition and standards, while delivering attractive architecture and innovative solutions such as green building technology.
Any comments? Email exhibitionworld@mashmedia.net
This was first published in the Issue 2/2012 edition of Exhibition World.
