Behind The Story

February 5, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

If you’ve been to the recently opened CityCenter in Las Vegas, you’ve probably glanced next door and noticed the shell of the Cosmopolitan Resort/Casino, seemingly abandoned mid-construction. However, if you call the developer and ask how things are going, you’re told the hotel – and the nearly quarter of a million square feet of exhibit and meeting space it supposedly will have – will open later this year.

I know. One look at the shape it’s really in, and you have to wonder exactly where in Dreamland its PR people are living.

February 3, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

A while back, I mentioned to a show organizer I know in Hong Kong that I’d been to Macau a couple months earlier and visited the convention and tradeshow facilities at the Venetian Macau.

His response was, “Could you see it for all the cobwebs?”

Although it’s not possible to get anybody at the Las Vegas Sands to comment on much of anything, from the ground level it looks like – though there have been some successful shows held there – the dream that, along with so many other things, M...Read More

January 29, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

People in Washington, D.C., have been telling me an anchor hotel next to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center was on its way practically since I first came to Tradeshow Week more than seven years ago.

The all-too-clichéd “ducks in a row” seemed to be lined up, however, with the land secured, investors in place, a brand (Marriott) decided on and a date for groundbreaking established. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the owners of another Marriott down the street, the Wardman Park ...Read More

January 26, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

The recent announcements that Greg Farrar had resigned as president and CEO of Nielsen Business Media and that Gordon T. Hughes II would be leaving American Business Media later this summer can be added to a long list of similar announcements concerning tradeshow-related institutions during the past year or so.

In fact, there have been so many of these announcements, under so many different kinds of circumstances, that one of the first – Mike Cooke, former CEO of dmg world media – now practically seems like ancient history.

It inspired me to get at least semi-scientific about...Read More

January 7, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Intl. CES opened today. Even in good years, the giant consumer products show is invested with great significance. It’s both the first major show of the year and typically the largest. (For many years now, it’s been No. 1 on the Tradeshow Week 200 whenever CONEXPO-CON/AGG doesn’t bump it down to No. 2.)

Whether they should or not, many in the tradeshow world figure the story on Intl. CES will tell them something about how their shows might do later in the year. Last year’s Intl. CES showfloor amounted to just more than 1.7 million square feet, about 150,000 sq. ft. smaller than the 2...Read More