EMECA – the European Association of Major Exhibition Centres – met on 22 and 23 October at Bilbao Exhibition Centre for its General Assembly. The meeting was attended by some thirty people representing the 25 leading trade fair venues in Europe.

Bilbao Exhibition Centre has been a member of EMECA since 2020, joining Fira de Barcelona, Ifema de Madrid and Feria de Valencia. Together with them, it shares experiences and information with the main European trade fair venues: Brussels, Lyon, Paris, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Bologna, Milan, Rimini, Verona, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Poznan, Lisbon, Basel and London.

On the agenda of BEC meeting was the approval of the minutes of the last meeting held in June in Stuttgart, and the election of the new board of directors, in which the Polish woman Elżbieta Roeske was elected president of EMECA for the next year.  BEC’s Director of Marketing and Communications, Mario Goffard, will continue to hold the position of the Association’s Vice President of Communications.

To round off two days’ work in Bilbao, on the evening of 23 October, the delegation travelled to the Guggenheim Museum, where, at a gala dinner, the BELA Award was presented to the Quantum Effects project of the Stuttgart Fair.

EMECA created the BELA award last year to recognise the best first edition of a trade fair, B2B or B2C, held at the Association’s venues over the previous year. This year’s award went to Quantum Effects, a meeting about application-oriented quantum technologies.