The length of time needed to bring complex and large machinery into the Messe Düsseldorf trade halls and out again is the reason why the new date for the 10-day epic tradeshow drupa is so far away, Messe Reps’ Australia and New Zealand travel representative Robert Laing said.
As was widely expected, Messe Düsseldorf , the organiser of the drupa tradeshow that is held every four years in Germany, has announced that due to the ongoing spread of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, the show scheduled for June 16 to 26 will now be held from April 10 to 20 in 2021.
Robert Laing is the Australian and New Zealand representative for Messe Düsseldorf and he said many people are asking why there is now such a long lead time for the show.
“The reason is it takes weeks to get the machines in to the fairground and have them assembled. There is still other fairs going on in Dusseldorf so they had to find the time when there was a big enough gap to fit not just the 11 days of drupa but the weeks beforehand and the weeks afterwards required for the build up of the fair and the breakup of the fair,” Laing told Sprinter.
“These are extraordinary circumstances, everybody is getting a bit of a hammering. It is just a bad situation for everybody and it’s nobody’s fault.”
Laing said the new date was arrived at in conjuction with Messe Düsseldorf and the representative companies that sit on the drupa management board.
He said hotels in Dusseldorf and airlines are for the most part being flexible in terms of moving the dates needed to April next year.
“drupa also has a management board and it includes representatives of the big companies within the industry and the new dates for drupa have been set in conjunction with the board so they were also a part of that decision making process.”
Laing said most of the events for the first half of the year have been postponed and the organisation is now waiting to see what will happen over the European summer.
“Most of the airlines are being pretty helpful in terms of allowing people to rebook their flights for later dates and they are loosening a lot of the penalties that they would normally have about changes,” Laing said.
“The hotels in Düsseldorf are in a really bad situation because they have got all these bookings for drupa and other events like the ProWein which has already been postponed but what they are doing in most cases is allowing people to transfer their bookings to new dates without penalty.
“That’s in most cases. I am sure there will be some examples where it doesn’t apply for whatever reason and I know that Messe Düsseldorf has asked the hotels to be flexible because everybody is suffering. Everybody is incurring some loss. Every traveller that is going to Germany is going to have something that they have paid that they can’t get back.
“The fair company is also incurring losses and the exhibiting companies might have already started shipping machinery over.”
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