AIBTM, the award-winning America’s Meetings & Events Exhibition, has announced that starting in 2013 the show’s location will rotate between the cities of Chicago, Illinois and Orlando, Florida.
Choose Chicago will host AIBTM from June 11th through June 13th, 2013, at McCormick Place. In 2014, AIBTM will move to Orlando, Florida and the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) from June 10th through June 12th, 2014.
In announcing these changes Craig Moyes, the Portfolio Director of the IBTM Global Events Portfolio for Reed Travel Exhibitions said, “We want to acknowledge and thank the great city of Baltimore for its invaluable contribution to AIBTM. We want to especially extend our gratitude to Tom Noonan and his team at Visit Baltimore who have helped drive this event since its launch. We look forward to our continuing relationship with the City of Baltimore. ”
The move and rotation of AIBTM will offer all stakeholders access to new business opportunities in two key gateway cities that are themselves major hubs of the meeting industry. The core brand values of AIBTM will remain the same: business and education will continue to serve as the key drivers and will be supplemented by peer to peer networking events over a three-day period.
“Following the lead of many associations in the US that move their events to a different place each year, we will now have the flexibility to maximize the enormous potential delivered to AIBTM by both Chicago and Orlando”, Moyes added.
Chicago offers more than 35,000 hotel rooms in the downtown central business district, as well as world-class cultural attractions, and is served by two international airports. McCormick Place is considered one of the country’s leading convention centres. Chicago is also home to many sectors of industry from manufacturing to IT, healthcare and transportation, with some 400 major corporate headquarters, 260,000 businesses on its doorstep and a two-hour flight from most major North American destinations.
Orlando is also one of the country’s leading meetings destinations, with the award-winning facility of Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) recently nominated as the #1 convention center in the US by Business Review USA. The OCCC is the second largest convention facility in America, and each year attracts more than 200 events. Some 116,000 hotel rooms are available in Orlando, home to countless entertainment attractions for visitors, and its international airport offers Remote Airline Check-in (RAC) services at the OCCC. The OCCC, with a commitment to providing meeting planners and participants with superior service and a national reputation for its green and sustainability initiatives, will be home to AIBTM in 2014.
