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Technology Stocks : Presstek -- Stock of the Decade?? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GVTucker who wrote (9947)	9/12/1998 10:32:00 AM
From: SG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11098

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.