FITUR: global business forum

Networking will be the trade show’s focal point through initiatives and programmes aimed at favouring trade meetings.

From January 20-24, 2016, IFEMA is organising the 36th International Tourism Trade Show, FITUR. With focus on business, the event becomes an indispensable appointment in the agendas of international tourism professionals, one in which they can exchange experiences and knowledge, learn about new strategies for their business and keep abreast of the latest tools for gaining competitiveness and presence in the marketplace.

Once again, the drive and promotion of tourism development will be the hallmark and added value of FITUR as a forum for the international tourism industry; hence the staging of events with a consolidated trajectory such as INVESTOUR Africa, organised jointly by FITUR, the UNWTO and Casa África. This investment and cooperation programme, which is in its seventh edition, has the goal of bringing together on the same stage the businesspeople and invest- ments from the 165 countries represented at the trade show and both public and private bodies from the African continent, with each year resulting in new proposals for tourism projects that promote a sustainable model for the economic development of Africa, a region that last year welcomed 56 million tourists and generated income amounting to 36.5 billion dollars.

This same format of previously scheduled personal interviews and work meetings will be held in a new staging of FITUR B2B Workshop Hosted Buyer, which last year registered 5,000 pre-scheduled business meetings in B2B encounters between exhibitors and more than 200 internation- al buyers. This is why the trade show is already working on an intense agenda of appointments between the companies and destinations that participate in FITUR and an important group of international hosted buyers.

Equally, the FITUR SHOPPING and FITUR HEALTH sections will have their own B2B programmes that ensure the attendance of international prescribers, both for shopping tourism and for health tourism. The last staging of FITUR attracted 9,419 companies from 165 countries. It was attended by 222,551 participants both professionals from the tourism industry and the wider public.