The British coin machine trade association, BACTA, is to seek dates for its own trade show next January at the Excel exhibition centre in south London.
The organisation will go for dates which clash head-on with Clarion Gaming’s ATEI exhibition, which is due to be held at Earls Court from January 26-28, 2010.
An open meeting of BACTA members and exhibitors at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham yesterday also told its sub-committee, set up under the chairmanship of Martin Burlin, to continue talks with InterGame with a view to ‘a relationship.’
The meeting was told that talks with Earls Court/Olympia to seek suitable dates at Olympia for January/February, were leading nowhere. The universal opinion was therefore that the new show should be held at Excel, despite a popular feeling in the past year that Excel, with its superb facilities, was unfortunately too inconvenient in terms of accessibility.
A number of meetings had been held with InterGame over the past few weeks to explore common ground between the trade association and the publication. InterGame hosted the highly successful small IGX breakaway show from ATEI in January of this year with 30 exhibitors. Several of those exhibitors at the Birmingham meeting praised InterGame’s organisation and others indicated that they felt the publication was the paramount international magazine for the sector.
InterGame’s David Snook said today: "We have had some talks with BACTA’s sub-committee set up to advise National Council on the new show project. We feel that there is a great deal of synergy between us. We will continue with those talks. In the final analysis we must keep our promise to our exhibitors to listen to their views."
