Aviation hold-up hits trade fairs in Germany

Apr 19, 2010, 15:54 GMT

Hanover, Germany - The closure of skies to airliners in northern Europe sharply pared attendance Monday at two trade shows, the Hanover Fair and the Bauma construction machinery exhibition in Munich.

In Hanover, organizers said about 10 per cent of exhibitors had failed to show up because executives could not obtain flights to Germany.

At some Chinese companies' booths in Hanover, carpenters had erected the furniture and signs and freight forwarders had delivered industrial machinery sent by sea.

But the pallets of machinery stood still packed in plastic wrap on the freshly laid booth carpet, with neither demonstrators nor salespeople anywhere to be seen. The Hanover Fair had rented out stand space to 4,800 exhibitors from 64 nations.

Deutsche Messe, the German exhibitions company, chartered buses to bring exhibitors from some European nations.

It paid for three coaches to ferry exhibitors from Istanbul, Turkey. The buses were not expected to reach Hanover till Monday evening, but the delayed executives would at least have the four remaining days of the fair to pitch their goods.

Hanover organizers said intrepid Spanish business people organized a car pool of 16 vehicles to make the trip north through France to arrive in time for Monday's opening.

At Bauma in Munich, where bulldozers and excavators are annually on show, 80 of the 3,000 booths were empty because of cancelled flights, said Klaus Dittrich, chief executive of the exhibitions company.

A saving grace had been that many exhibitors came from European countries which have train connections to Munich. Others had chartered buses for the trip. 'Quite a few are still on their way,' he said Monday afternoon.

Bauma staff said it was difficult to say if the aviation disruptions had significantly reduced buyer attendance.

It was usual for about 15 per cent of trade visitors to arrive by air, but that number included those arriving by short-haul jets who could easily switch to rail.

Ulrich Blum, president of a German think tank, called Monday for the duration of the Hanover Fair to be extended into this weekend or beyond. He was speaking to a magazine, Super Illu.

Companies were otherwise likely to miss out on orders, warned Blum, who heads the Halle Institute for Economic Research.

The Hanover show exhibits factory machinery and robots. Blum said investment goods like those were vital to Germany's recovery.

Friedhelm Loh, president of the federation of electronics industry associations ZVEI, concurred that the fair was vital to German exporters.

'Every no-show buyer is a tangible loss,' he said.

Trade fairs are normally a thriving business in their own right in Germany, creating thousands of jobs for event managers, the hospitality trade, carpenters and drivers. But even without the airline disruption, many fairs have been stagnant or in decline.