Globalizing Not a Top Industry Priority
Michael Hart -- Tradeshow Week, 6/24/2008 3:34:00 PM
While some major U.S.-based health care tradeshows and meetings consistently draw large numbers of international attendees, the participation of foreign health care professionals has grown just slightly during the past 10 years. What’s more, exhibitors at many health care tradeshows say they are not really prepared to adequately serve those foreign visitors anyway.
According to an HCEA special report on health care meeting globalization, associations that identify their events as international meetings reported that 29 percent of their attendees were from other countries in 2007. That is up substantially from the last time HCEA asked for such information in 2003, when the figure was 19.9 percent.
However, Frank Skinner, HCEA’s marketing research and communications manager, said that low percentage was in large part an anomaly caused by the poor state of the economy five years ago and the residual reluctance on the part of the public to travel following the events of Sept. 11.
In 1998, international attendance at U.S. health care shows was 23.6 percent, just 5.4 percent less than last year.
At the same time, many of those international visitors do not travel very far to attend U.S. health care shows.
HCEA’s study found that 73 percent of those visitors were from elsewhere in North America, primarily Canada. Another 14 percent were from Europe, followed by 6 percent from Asia, 4 percent from South America, 2 percent from Australia and 1 percent from Africa.
In preparing its globalization study, HCEA interviewed representatives from 45 major health care companies on their exhibiting practices. Most of them said, because of either country-specific regulations or their own company codes of conduct, it was difficult to adequately serve the international visitors.
In fact, 60.7 percent said, “We cannot accommodate non-U.S. attendees at most U.S. conventions.”
Just 14 percent said they had language- or country regulation-specific exhibit materials for foreign exhibitors, and only 4 percent said they planned to have them in the future.
