Cologne Business School. The award ceremony of the Best Exhibitor Awards (BEA) which is organized by students of the Cologne Business School (CBS) during the ITB in Berlin was once again one of the fair highlights.
Four days long, the future Tourism Managers of the CBS evaluated the approximately 12,000 exhibitors at the CBS according to numerous criteria like information content, interactivity, interesting effects and service quality.
Saturday night, March 9, the award ceremony took place in the Palais at the Funkturm on the Berlin fair trade premises. The CBS students Jessica Wack and Marie-Caroline Utsch hosted this year’s award ceremony. The three best placed exhibitors of each category were awarded in front of over 600 invited guests.
The patron of the project is Klaus Laepple, honorary president of the DRV and former president of the Federal Association of the German Tourism Industry (BTW). The General Secretary of the BTW, Michael Rabe, held a welcoming address, thanked the students for their outstanding commitment and recommended them as future tourism managers.
For days on end, the future tourism managers, most of whom opted for the core subject of Tourism, have visited some 12,000 booths at the ITB and assessed them according to numerous criteria such as booth construction, information contents, service quality, friendliness and special effects.
As in every year, extraordinary performances of the prizewinners took place at the award ceremony. Besides many others, the Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka danced, Sharjah and Burundi drummed their way onto the stage with traditional sounds. This year’s Best of Best Award was given to Abu Dhabi.
For Emirates, the prizewinner in the category Carrier, Volker Greiner, Emirates Vice President North & Central Europe: “We are proud to receive the prestigious Best Exhibitor Award for our trade fair appearance this year. Over many years, ITB Berlin has become our largest trade fair presence outside our home market in Dubai. (…)”
Following four intense trade fair days, Prof. Dr. Guido Sommer, Dean of the Tourism Department at the CBS, draws a positive conclusion: “The assessment criteria have been further optimised, the higher semester students have trained the students involved for the first time highly professionally and I look forward to walking around the trade fair to invite the prizewinners to the Award Show after all the sheets have been evaluated.”
www.cbs-bea.de
