by Joachim Fischer, White Swan Hotel, Guangzhou, China
The 2011 Guangzhou International Travel Fair grandly kicked off at Guangzhou Jinhan Exhibition Center. Mr. Zhu Li, Director General of the Tourism Administration of Guangzhou Municipality and Mr. Wolfgang Lenarz, Senior Vice President of Deutsche Messe AG, Hannover, deliverd the welcome speeches. Mr. Cao Jianliao, Vice Mayor of Guangzhou Municipal Government attended the Opening ceremony together with Leaders from Municipal Governments and Tourism Bureaus of Inner Mongolia, Wuhan, Hong Kong, Macao, the A.U.E., US, India, Cuba, Turkey, South Korea and Sri Lanka. Nearly 300 guests, media and buyers made their presence at the grand ceremony.
512 exhibitors from 40 countries and regions with a display of 15.000 square meter, with up to 46 % of them from out of China. The show is open to trade visitors for two days and then one day for the public. Over 60.000 visitors are expected to the site
Hunderts of visitors, mostly young or older people are waiting in front of the hall to go in long time before the official opening. The floors are packed with people and most of them are only collecting colourfull broschures and have blocked the stands. On the entrance we have seen some fights between the visitors and the guards!
During the opening buyers lunch and the first day of the exhibition we have missed real buyers and we have not seen a lot of international faces but hunderts of young girl and boys in uniform holding displays and marching in line through the hall.
The exhibition organizer has promotet this GITF as a show with a lot of international visitors and stands – but most of the peoples on the stands cannot speak englisch and have only Broschures and material in Chinese.
Even the official Press Center has only one press release for the opening day but has given out two press releases dated 7th. and 24th. of January 2011
We will see what happened on the second day and we hope that Mr. Wolfgang Lenarz from the Deutsche Messe, will check this and bring the GITF to a international standard as they have announced before.
