Today, 28 October 2020, the exhibition industry unanimously begins official talks on the extremely difficult situation of the whole sector.

The Defence Committee of the Trade Fair Industry will pass on the postulates to the Prime Minister; the agreement on them concerns the future of trade fair centres and organisers of fair, congress or conference events, as well as, to a large extent, the surrounding industries, such as business tourism, which generates significant revenues for the hotel, transport and catering industry. It is hard not to mention companies providing services for the trade fair and event sector. Before the pandemic, the state budget received about half a billion zlotys a year in VAT from the fair sector. So we are not only talking about the future of thousands of entrepreneurs and people employed in the trade fair industry and related areas. We are talking about the Polish economy, which cannot afford to lose revenue generated by the trade fair and event industry.

Restrictions on the industry started at the end of February 2020, and with more or less restrictions they continue all the time. The individual trade fair events that took place after the unfreezing of the economy and the restarting of events in June did not allow the losses from previous months to be covered. Entering the “new reality for organisers of industry or B2C events was connected with additional costs resulting from the need to secure events from the sanitary point of view, which was influenced, among others, by the costs of dispensers with disinfectant, additional cleaning crews whose task was frequent disinfection, disinfection booths with automatic temperature measurement, additional marking concerning the sanitary safety rules during the fair, or, in the case of PTAK Warsaw Expo for example, distribution of free disposable masks for each fair participant. The contracted events for autumn 2020 will not necessarily take place despite the costs incurred by the organisers and exhibitors.

According to research conducted by the Polish Chamber of Exhibition Industry, almost 76% of companies lost their only source of income. The representatives of the Chamber also estimated that the trade fair industry in downtime reaches losses of PLN 150 million per month, which means that at the moment, after 8 months, the industry has already lost over PLN 1 billion and has to reckon with the loss of further millions.

The industry has held its breath and it is hard to be optimistic about the nearest future. The demands presented by the Trade Fair Industry Defence Committee are a real help for those in power to understand the trade fair business and work out real, safe and functional solutions allowing them to return to business as soon as possible.