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Set against the backdrop of the Alps, the beautiful lakeside city of Geneva was host to the 3-day Airspace World 2024 event. With over 7,000 delegates from more than 140 countries, Airspace World Geneva was 2024’s most influential event in the airspace management industry. Attendees included industry leaders, influencers, key stakeholders, and the world’s media – if you’re in the air traffic management industry, you were at Airspace World Geneva.

Meet Aireon

Aireon is a US-based company that provides air traffic controllers with navigation and position data. As a modestly sized organization with a BIG reputation, Airspace World is Aireon's biggest and highest-profile event. Where else can they meet with long-term clients and network with new contacts in the same location while highlighting their industry-leading expertise?

Go big or go home

As an experienced exhibitor, Emily Feliz, the Aireon marketing and communications director, had three clear objectives. She needed a booth that would:

• Be a comfortable branded space for Aireon representatives to meet existing clients and network with new connections
• Include a dedicated demo area where Aireon could showcase its new products and capabilities
• Reinforce Aireon's position as an industry leader

As the biggest trade event run by Aireon, everything associated with Airspace World Geneva needed to go perfectly to plan - a lot of pressure for Emily and her team.

A proven process

Planning for Airspace World Geneva kicked off nine months before the event, with a post-evaluation of the previous year’s event at Airspace World Geneva. Here, Ed Kooymans – Team Hoynck's senior project manager - and Emily reviewed the learnings they wanted to take into Airspace World Geneva. They agreed on objectives and met with the designer to talk about the flow of the booth and evolving the previous design. Booth flow is critical to ensuring a positive visitor experience and is something Emily feels Hoynck does exceptionally well, saying, “They really look at the booth holistically and pay attention to the customer experience within the booth. They go beyond questions such as ‘how many chairs and tables do you want? Where do you want the TVs?’”.

Ed and the designer took on Emily’s feedback to refine the design by liaising directly with Aireon’s marketing agency, relieving Emily and her team of the extra work in coordinating multiple agencies. Operating this way also guaranteed the best files and graphics were used in the booth while ensuring the project remained on track.

Handling the challenges of working across continents

Delivering an event on a different continent made it essential for Emily to trust her exhibition team completely. “Having 3D renders of the stand is one thing, but I needed a team I could have faith in. It’s not like I could pop down the road to see how things were progressing. I knew the Hoynck team would be on top of it and paying attention to the whole process”. She was also reassured by Hoynck’s familiarity with venues across the world – helping navigate the quirks of one place ahead of another.

The high-impact, two-level stand design made for a particularly complex project with challenging build logistics and mountains of paperwork and approvals. Ed and his team handled everything from the customs paperwork involved in shipping materials back and forth to ordering IT equipment and hiring hostesses for the booth. Emily explains, “They thought of things and fixed them before I even had a chance to stress about it, much less do anything about it – they helped make the planning process very, very easy”.

A trusted team

With the design and production taken care of, the build process could eventually begin onsite at Palexpo, Geneva. Arriving on location, Emily appreciated the continuity, saying, “Once we got on site, I loved that we were working with familiar faces. Not only Ed but the folks who were building the booth, too. Their attention to detail is outstanding and reinforces the trust we have in Team Hoynck. They’re there, buffing out fingerprints, making everything look perfect”.

The event was a huge success, with the Aireon team holding an incredible number of formal client meetings and dozens of impromptu new conversations, which the team are now busy following up with. 

“The thing that really stands out for me is the process that Team Hoynck go through and the trust and reliability they enable. They are very thorough and put a huge amount of effort into understanding us as a company and the industry we operate in. This trust and in-depth awareness of our needs make our presence at Airspace World that much better. Hoynck have set a very, very high bar for me, and I know we’ll be working with them for a long time to come.”