Award winning clients were order of the day at Confex 2009! Destination users of Velvet's Chaser BUREAU and ConferenceBOOKINGS systems were amongst those leading the judges' final choices for their exhibition presence at the show and their service offering throughout the year.
Our congratulations go to Sarah Bird and her team of Telford and Shropshire Conferences for "Best Stand" at this year's exhibition, and to Yorkshire South's impressive purpose-built display. In particular, Glasgow City Marketing Bureau's Scott Taylor and Molly Doheny were awarded best UK convention bureau for a second year running. Glasgow use Velvet's on-line accommodation booking system ConferenceBookings.co.uk to manage allocations for well over £1M of bookings each year.
Velvet Software's Chris Gibbs, Simon Hawkins and Tim Clark were all present at the exhibition and were kept busy throughout the duration. "It's my third Confex now", said Chris, "it's great now that I know all of the clients having worked with them remotely and a few on-site also!". Pictured on the Nottingham Convention Bureau stand, Tim said, "It's only an hour from our offices to Earls Court, so it's the ideal meeting point for us to catch up with clients, udpate them on our development work and obtain valuable feedback on the current systems and services we offer in addition to discussing new opportunities with them".
This year's exhibition felt busier than last, "I was surprised - and pleased - at the volume of visitors and, speaking with destinations, the volume of quality leads they all reported", said Velvet's Simon Hawkins. "Many of the stands were really innovative whilst offering an open forum to speak with visitors and promote destinations", Simon added.
Some destinations who hadn't been to Confex for a couple of years decided to exhibit, alongside the "regulars" many of whom use the event as their main marketing push for the year.
Not content with representation from the Conference desk, Chester grabbed visitors' attention with a couple of their stand sharing partners!
Kent Conference Bureau's Dawn Bowen was proud of her new marketing, brochure and web site, implemented to match new design them using Velvet's Chaser WEB module. Once back in the office, leads taken from the exhibition or via the Chaser WEB module are automatically de-duplicated and imported into the enquiry-handling CRM system Chaser BUREAU for processing.
We hope that all of the desintations present convert the excellent leads that they obtained and that levels of business are maintained throughout the forthcoming year.
