Hi all,

One of our Partner’s in South America, Marcio Loducca of NewspaperDirect Brazil, recently exhibited at the Equipotel tradeshow in Sao Paulo. Here are his comments and some pictures of the event:

Equipotel is the biggest hospitality trade show in Brazil and the 5^th largest in the world, and widely targets all sectors of the hospitality industry including hotels, restaurants and hospitals. While the greater majority of attendees are from Brazil, Equipotel is also attended by people from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay.

The tradeshow was help from September 12 -15 at Sao Paulo’s 55,000 sq. ft. Centro de Convenções Anhembi (Anhembi Exhibition Center), which is the largest event space in all of Latin America.

We have exhibited in previous years as well and felt that it was important to once again have a presence at the event, and continue to build the NewspaperDirect brand within Brazil. The Equipotel fair provides an excellent opportunity to showcase all of our services and offerings, and build new relationships with key players in the hospitality industry. Our objective for this show was to develop key contacts within the sporting events industry and tap into potential deals and contracts for the upcoming events in Brazil – World Cup 2014 and Olympic Games 2016.

In comparison to previous years, we have found that the main shift this year is that the hospitality industry is becoming more and more saturated with the younger generation. We are seeing more young adults and even several students at the show, representing their organizations and playing a key role in the decision making process.  Our hotel industry has been slowly but surely changing, as with the rest of the world, and institutional tradeshows like Equipotel offer a wide variety of valuable resources for people that are looking for new and unique services for their establishments and help these properties become more streamlined with what our visitors have come to expect during their travels to Brazil.

For our booth design this year, we decided to take more of a creative approach and promote the luxury amenity services that we can provide with printed newspapers. As you can see in the pictures below, we bundled the printed newspapers with a fresh flower bouquet into an attractive package – we found that this was a very appealing strategy and many of our customers were drawn to our booth because of this. Based on the positive feedback we have received from our booth visitors, we will be working on a few different luxury bundling strategies in the near future to create a stronger appeal for our hotel customers.

In addition to our newspaper print-and-deliver service, our staff was also fully equipped with everything they needed to promote ND Press and Hotel PressDisplay to the appropriate customers.

We are definitely looking to exhibit at the next Equipotel show as well, so if any of our other South American ND Partners would be interested in learning how they could also exhibit or attend the show, please get in touch with Sandeep at sandeepk@newspaperdirect.com

Thanks,

Marcio Loducca
NewspaperDirect Brazil