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Make every moment count

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At the end of every event, goody bags become inundated with printed collateral, bulky gifts, oversized souvenirs and so on. Eventbaxx offers a digital alternative

As we prepare for one of the most important Mice gatherings of the year – Imex Frankfurt event taking place from May 16 to 18 – let’s remind ourselves of the joys of our vocation.

Making every moment count has been the centrepiece of the customer or audience focus puzzle. As consultants, providers and creators of destination-led experiences, we are trying at all times to create more magical moments for the end users.

Be it destination experience developments that tourism authorities invest in, be it immersive luxurious experiences that hotel owners and operators innovate, or simple, efficient services, we are collaborating in the eternal march towards a bigger, better and more rewarding travel and tourism product.

At Imex Frankfurt, five exciting idea owners will pitch to grab audience attention – irrespective of final outcome, each of these ideas are winners in their own right.

This year’s line-up includes technologies dedicated to business networking, streamlining travel, audience interaction, crowdsourcing of content and the better and faster use of data through artificial intelligence. They are looking at the challenges we face as travel consultants and attempt to solve them, to add value to them and leap ahead. Each brand will have five minutes to put forward its product, including the concept, features and unique selling points, to a live audience. The winner, chosen by an expert judging panel, will receive free exhibition space at Imex Frankfurt 2018.

Here are TTN’s top two picks from the five contenders of the #IMEXpitch.

Fly another day. How do you ensure that your landmark Mice event being hosted in a different continent is not coinciding with a major national holiday or local festival? What ensures that a competitive event is not taking place in the same area? Event planners have long taken the anxiety pill over these issues, and not until the event is over and the reports out, can they breathe that proverbial sigh of relief. Those days of touchy nerves are possibly behind us since this new enterprise, Fly Another Day, aims to secure the best date by sifting through all relevant data that concerns your strategic Mice event – date, geography, targets, competition – so you can funnel down to the best dates to host the event. Go ahead and have a look www.flyanotherday.com

My colleagues in the event industry often rue the lack of focused information for hosting public events or corporate events – think festivals, congress, even bespoke incentive events. I’m told that the planning of any major Mice event starts with the venue and the event space, and it is here that Spacebase can make a difference – by providing ground-up overview of major cities and the event paces on offer. The Middle East definitely needs www.spacebase.com

It is not the first time that cool ideas that enable Mice planners have been presented at Imex. Take, for example, last year’s winner www.eventbaxx.com. This enterprise aims to take on the problem of goody bags head on. Every Mice event must end on a sweet note, but often it become a weighty affair. Goody bags become inundated with printed collateral, bulky gifts, oversized souvenirs and so on.

What if the information that every brand wants to convey is presented on a mobile-friendly format, what if the value of the incentive is translated into coupons and distributed across the same digital platform, accessed on the smartphone screen? Suddenly the problem of design, sourcing, production and carriage of goody bags become all about content, design, placement and conversion of giveaway value into redeemable coupons.

Do I hear many of you cry out, Eureka? Genius ideas are not limited to these innovating enterprises alone, each one of us have the access to new-age tools to experiment with and apply. Our audiences expect more, the younger ones need things done immediately, and on the go. Can we think beyond the ordinary?

Here’s to a summer of thinking and out-thinking the competition.

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