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Thousands of people will flock to Las Vegas next week, a city synonymous with hedonistic abuse, to watch the cement dry up.
It’s been almost 40 years since Steve Hill took part in the first World of Concrete event, but he’s never been more excited than with the trade show. It’s not just a chance to see the latest mixer trucks or watch concrete finishing competitions; The 2021 WOC will return the agreements to a city that is dependent on these economies and an industry that is struggling to replicate its attractions online.
After several decades in the mixed concrete industry, Hill is now the director general of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the organization responsible for attracting visitors to the Nevada playground and the owner of the convention center that will host the Informa-run show. .
Last year, when the coronavirus covered casinos and exhibition halls, the number of visitors to Las Vegas fell by 55 percent to 19m. Although occupancy on the list has doubled from January to two-thirds of the usual level, the LVCVA has recorded a zero or “no” number of congressional trips per month since April last year.
That is about to change. With Las Vegas removing restrictions on major rallies on June 1 and more than 40 percent of the U.S. population fully immersed, organizers of events that have struggled with online conferencing over the past 14 months feel confident enough to recapture pre-trade shows.
“The recovery has happened faster than we thought or expected,” Hill says. With few international visitors to Las Vegas and the fact that the event was delayed at the busiest time in the construction industry, attendance at WOC 2021 will surely be below nearly 60,000 people, but the first major show described by Hill will be surprisingly powerful.
It was later used by the Las Vegas Convention Center pandemic To complete the $ 989 million extension, Hill’s residence has rented more square feet than ever before through July 1 of the year. Scheduled events range from tonight’s disco and bar show to the Water Quality Association’s agreement later this month.
Each will have its own importance for Nevada, which believes the agreements provide $ 11.5 billion a year in gross domestic product for about $ 178 billion to the state and its most popular city, where the April 9 unemployment rate was. only the second To Los Angeles from 50 major metropolitan areas.
Being pre-pandemic, Las Vegas could count on recreational travelers to occupy casinos in more than 95 percent of the weekends, but relied on convention customers to fill its 150,000 hotel rooms on weekdays.
Hervé Sedky, general manager of the Emerald events team, has organized 90 events in August, almost all of them in Las Vegas. Starting at the Pizza Expo and attending the Antique Jewelry and Watch Show, he said they will get the largest number of events in the company’s history, even though participants are only a third and a half of the previous level of the pandemic.
Las Vegas has followed up on Florida and Texas, “which were never completely closed,” Sedky warned, and the reopening has prompted other cities like Chicago and New York to continue.
The Javits Center in Manhattan, billed as the most crowded convention center in the U.S., became a rural hospital for Covid-19 patients last spring and has recently become the city’s largest vaccination site. By August, however, he plans to return to organizing events.
Sedky says the cities ’eagerness to reopen to trade fairs reflects their need to revive the economies set aside by the pandemic. “Eighty percent more [our] customers are small businesses. . . Not having a fair is really problematic for them. As we are thinking about reopening the economy, it is important that these businesses start doing business again, ”he says.
Organizers like Informa and Emerald moved many of their events last year to try to keep this business alive, but “virtual exhibits don’t really provide the value our customers seek,” Sedky admits.
He says the informative content of the virtual shows has been fairly well received, but “the section on repeating the fair floor online doesn’t work. It’s horrible.”
Emerald threw her finger back in the waters of personal events in January with a show for the surfing industry in Orlando, Florida. Attendance was half of what it was before Covid-19, but exhibitors gave it excellent reviews, reporting that it led to significant requests.
The 3,500 buyers who showed up were “not so happy,” Sedky admits, “Their complaint was there that it wasn’t enough to see.”
Such experiments will allow the industry to improve security protocols, which will still calm guests with the risk of infecting guests.
At the Surf Expo booths with Plexiglas displays, a hands-free policy and an intolerant face mask policy for health and safety “ambassadors,” Sedky recalled: “We were three people discussing whether to wear a mask: we threw it away. .
Hill’s premises have introduced contactless registration in the same way and will present food differently, he says, although several nearby casinos have relaunched buffets that are synonymous with Vegas. World of Concrete 2021 will not require attendees to prove the vaccine.
The pandemic won the finances of many of the largest companies in the sector. Revenue events for RELX, which owns Reed Exhibitions, fell from 1.3 billion euros to 362 million last year.
But Reed he said last month the vast majority of its customers shifted their 2020 reservations to 2021 and in March attracted nearly 3,000 buyers and 170 exhibitors to the Jewelers International Showcase in Miami Beach – above the normal level of 10%.
One emerging model is that travel restrictions mean that home shows in the U.S. and elsewhere are better than international ones.
Hill says this dynamic is driving a faster recovery in the Las Vegas tourism business: with so few Americans flying abroad, more of them are taking breaks in Las Vegas. Instead of flying the number of visitors who went to the city to bet, it is above what it was in 2019, he noted.
With unemployment still so high in the city that it is dependent on visitors, Las Vegas is stepping up its efforts to push back more of them, announcing the city’s long-running risk of harassing players and congressmen.
A new ad campaign on U.S. television euphemistically invites visitors to embrace the “adult freedom that only Las Vegas offers”.
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