Dubai trade show Arabian Travel Market announces three-day virtual event in June

The Arabian Travel Market (ATM) has announced the launch of a three-day ATM Virtual event which will take place from June 1-3, 2020.

ATM Virtual will feature webinars, live conference sessions, roundtables, speed networking events, one-on-one meetings and online business opportunities.

Each day, up to four live sessions will be held with industry experts who will address a range of topics around the resilience of the travel industry, emerging travel technology and sustainability trends.

“We will address the impact the global health pandemic has had on the travel and tourism industry and discuss a road map to recovery, identifying the trends shaping the future of the industry and the ‘new normal’ that lies ahead,” said Danielle Curtis, exhibition director ME, Arabian Travel Market.

Day one will include a session on Communicating and Building Confidence Now and The Hotel Landscape in a Post-COVID-19 World.

Day two will include the Virtual ATM China Forum and networking sessions as well as Bouncing Back: Tourism Strategies for the Future and Catapulting Resilience Through Technology and Analytics.

Day three will conclude with the International Travel Investment Conference.

The agenda also features interviews with aviation keynote speakers who will provide a detailed update on the aviation industry which has been significantly impacted by way of the global travel restrictions.

It will include a session by Arival, focused on the rise of online travel agencies, the re-opening of operations, and what this means for tour and attraction operators across the Middle East.

Also, one-on-one pre-scheduled 30-minute meetings will be organised between editors, exhibitors and buyers.

Live video sessions will include Q&As and polls which will run alongside the presentations.

A series of independently moderated, pre-recorded on-demand roundtables have been designed to discuss topics such as domestic travel, luxury travel trends, corporate travel, and tourism recovery plans.

The statement added that key travel editors and leading travel and tourism experts will write blogs on subjects spanning not just regional but international industry verticals.

To ensure interactivity between participating exhibitors and buyers, there will be a host of hour-long speed networking sessions comprising of over 1,400 5-minute meetings that can be extended into more in-depth meetings when a business need is identified and further interaction is required.

“For exhibitors from this region, the dedicated networking event will also have one Middle East-focused session per day, as well as sessions for buyers, focused on purchasing European and Asian products, plus a session specifically targeting Chinese buyers,” noted Curtis.

In March, the organisers of Arabian Travel Market announced that they had decided to postpone the region’s largest travel fair that was originally scheduled to take place in Dubai from April 19-22, 2020 to June 28-July 1, 2020 at the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC).

In April, however, the organisers said that they decided to cancel the physical version of this year’s event as the Covid-19 situation globally worsened and confirmed that the next on-ground version of the event will be held at the DWTC from May 16-19, 2021.

Read: Dubai trade event Arabian Travel Market cancels 2020 edition