A diverse range of Middle East and overseas suppliers to the hospitality industry were counting their benefits in real terms after their appearance at The Hotel Show in Dubai.
The Middle East's leading hotel supplies exhibition at the Airport Expo recorded the best-ever attendance figures of more than 3,500 hotel trade visitors and 180 exhibitors. The British husband and wife business partnership of Alan Mitchell and Carol Conci could win $4million worth of business as a result of their joint efforts at show. His company, Lighting Design Partnership International, is expecting to firm-up orders worth $1.25 million to design lighting for at least ten Middle East hotels, and that could mean her company, ConciLuce, supplying the lighting equipment at around $300,000 per hotel. Dubai-based Amusement Whitewater expects contacts made to boost its current Dh40 million turnover as theming contractors, theme park and artificial rock work specialists, and makers of African thatched chalets and stunning African furniture carved from railway sleepers. Bose Corporation Middle East, which reported major interest in the award-winning Auditioner sound system given its Middle East launch at the show, also secured a Dhs400,000 contract to supply music systems for executive suites at a Middle East hotel. Warisan, one of Indonesia's leading manufacturers of upmarket hotel and resort furnishings, followed up the recent opening of a UAE office by making its show debut in Dubai. Madini (Made and Designed in Northern Ireland) Hotelworks, which occupied 10 per cent of the exhibition space, found interest so strong that it immediately based a marketing representative in the UAE to follow-up on business leads. "We expected all the major European countries, the sub-continent, Far East, Africa, and of course the Middle East itself, to be strongly represented," said Joanne Evans, director of Streamline Marketing, the show organiser. "But visitors from countries such as the US, Canada, Brazil, Vietnam, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Slovakia, and Armenia, showed just how far this event's reputation has spread since it began three years ago." The exhibition was purchased last year by dmg Index Exhibitions Ltd, part of dmg World Media, and the new owners were rewarded by a record line-up of 180 exhibitors, a 50 per cent increase on 2001. The Hotel Show was for the first time run in conjunction with the Office Exhibition, and the two events attracted a combined total of 5,650 trade visitors.