Ipex rooms and flights selling like hot cakes
dotprint.com
Last-minute Ipex visitors are being urged to book flights and
hotel rooms as soon as possible, or else be forced to
commute to Birmingham from as far afield as Leicester or
London.
Hotel rooms across the West Midlands are selling like hot
cakes, and flights between Birmingham and Europe are being
booked up, as printers flock to the exhibition, held at the
National Exhibition Centre on September 22-30.
With a week to go, Ipex 98 has 33,500 preregistered visitors,
compared to 11,000 at the same stage before Ipex 93.
Bookings were still coming in at up to 1,000 a day until the
preregistration hotline closed on Friday.
Ipex organiser IIR hopes that at least another 50,000 visitors
will turn up on the door, making about 100,000 visitors in
total - the same size as the Glastonbury music festival.
With 30% of visitors coming from overseas, Birmingham
International Airport, which is just yards away from the NEC,
could do a roaring trade.
"We're being inundated with faxes and phone calls. We've had
flight bookings from India, and even quite a few from
Mauritius," says Beverley Pilkington of British Airways, the
official airline of Ipex.
BA is predicting that its services in and out of Birmingham
will be 50% busier than usual. Flights from Germany to
Birmingham on September 21, 22 and 23 are already sold
out, and planes from Paris, Barcelona and Madrid are filling
up fast.
BA may have to draft in extra check-in and baggage staff to
cope with the numbers. Four special services - two from
Amsterdam to Birmingham on the 22nd, and two from
Brussels on the 23rd - have been laid on by Transavia and
Virgin Express. All four planes fly back on the 28th.
There are also signs that Ipex is attracting lots of visitors
from Scandinavian papermills. "Some flights from Helsinki to
Heathrow during Ipex week have sold out, even though
normally there's loads of spare capacity this time of year,"
says Ms Pilkington.
With rooms in Birmingham and Coventry very scarce, many
visitors will be commuting in from hotels in Leicester, an
hour's drive away, or even London. "I've heard that one man
is staying as far away as Newcastle. We don't know if that's
his choice or not," says Ms Pilkington.
The 882 rooms at the Stakis Birmingham Metropole, the only
hotel on the NEC site, sold out almost as soon as Ipex 93
ended. |
