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Good to hear the former director of ICMS Australasia, Ian Stuart, made it back from IMEX in one piece following an 11-day stint in a Frankfurt hospital after suffering a burst appendix. And the same can be said for G1 Productions’ Ian Walsh (pictured above with Skye Essington-Wilson), who suffered a similar fate in the middle of an event he was organising. Ian soldiered on just one week after his surgery and was manning his stand at RSVP 06. Let’s hope this isn’t the start of an events industry trend.

A note to all advertisers, readers and industry folk about mice.net’s editorial policy after we heard in a roundabout fashion that we might consider spreading some bad publicity if one party didn’t make good on a sponsorship initiative. This is an absolutely and abysmally unprofessional claim, and mice.net has not and never will be party to tactics of this kind. It is plain insulting! We do often “tell it like it is” which gets us in plenty of hot water, but that’s the name of the game. Not everything is perfect. If it was, then we’d be living in Nirvana, wouldn’t we? To the unprincipled individual who made this claim, we know who you are and we don’t appreciate you implicating us in your attempt at fixing an error you made in the first place.

We’re not sure what it was: the smaller, more intimate venue, the standing-room-only seminars or the live entertainment but the vibe at RSVP 06 in Sydney was certainly something to write home about. Organisers must be happy with the event. Certainly the majority of exhibitors are!

Professional exhibition companies will tell you that when you spend money on exhibiting at an event you have to do a lot more than sit on a chair and wait for the business to come rolling in. But after attending a huge number of exhibitions in recent weeks, amazingly that’s what some people still do. And for those who do get off their butts and still don’t get any business then it’s one of two things: what you’re selling stinks or the exhibition is just no good.

“I have to pass on to your readers the fantastic experience Staging Dimensions has had with renewing our insurances. After a meeting with our current insurers we were advised of more restrictions in our policy. We made the decision two weeks before expiry at the end of June to look around and contacted MEA’s preferred brokers, AON. Philip Sunshine at AON was most helpful and after the first call he had our confidence. Within two weeks he had arranged for a risk assessor to go through our building, discussed all the coverage we needed including stock, public and professional, and despite increasing our coverage by a substantial amount, he was able to arrange coverage at a price which was comparable to what we were paying. But best of all, the restrictions that had been imposed by our previous insurer for the last few years and had caused difficulty in our business were all gone.”
- Russell Bennett, general manager, Staging Dimensions & Lighting Dimensions

Following mice.net’s last rant about the Federal Minister for Tourism, Fran Bailey, not being able to make it to the last two MEA conferences, we have it on good authority she will be trying her darndest to get to next year’s event in Tasmania. mice.net has sent her the dates of the event and her advisor says he will try to lock it in ASAP. But there’s no chance if Parliament is sitting.