In Toulouse, what results for the MEETT after one year of operation?
The new boss of the Toulouse Events subsidiary, of the Lyon group GL Events, gave an interview to The gallery a few days after the first edition of the Rose Festival of Toulouse rappers Big Flo & Oli, successful according to him, at the MEETT. The music festival has indeed been sold out (50,000 festival-goers, 65% of whom would have come by tram according to figures from Toulouse Events) and the organizers are now thinking about “increase gauge“and why not”spend the festival over three days“. But is the Rose Festival the end point of a positive first year of operation for the new Toulouse exhibition center?
La Tribune – The MEETT, the name that the local authorities have given to the new exhibition center in Toulouse, located north of the agglomeration to replace that on the Ile du Ramier, was stopped in September 2021. Twelve months more late, what initial assessment do you draw from this first year of operation?
Olivier Chanel – It has been an almost normal year with still some negative consequences related to Covid-19. We had a bit of partial unemployment at the start of the year (Toulouse Events has 70 employees, editor’s note) because many events were canceled due to a photo epidemic from mid-December. Apart from this shadow on the board, we are in the nails of what we had planned. Over the last twelve months, we are at 16 million euros in turnover just for the MEETT (the company also manages in DSP the Pierre Baudis congress center and the Vanel spaces, editor’s note). It is the result of a commercialization started more than four years ago.
do you already think we can make a comparison between the old exhibition center located in the heart of Toulouse and this one supposed to offer greater reception capacities? Does it show in the numbers?
On the Ile du Ramier, we did a maximum of fifty events a year. Here, at MEETT, we are going to host between 85 and 90 events in this first year and the prospects are to increase to between 100 and 110. It is incomparable. We are also targeting large-scale events. We had over twenty new events with at least 1,200 attendees. We attract new events but also national and international congresses… These are things that we couldn’t have in Toulouse before.
If the MEETT is above all an exhibition center of 40,000 m2, it is also a convention center with a capacity of 3,500 people and 9,000 m2 of multifunctional spaces. How is it going for the marketing of this part, a type of equipment that Toulouse did not have before the MEETT?
This is indeed what was missing in Toulouse and it is on the convention center that 80% of the development of the activity takes place, although it is still the exhibition center part which hosts the most events. On many events, we are regularly in competition with Lyon to host them because it is the second congress city in France after Paris.
For example, next November we will host a private congress of 2,600 people for five days. These are researchers from around the world who come together to discuss and share their work on 5G and 6G standards in part. For a week, they will live in Toulouse, imagine the economic income on the territory…
How do you plan for the years to come with regard to the operation of the MEETT?
Knock on wood so that we no longer relive the troubled period from which we have just emerged… For the rest, most of the recurring shows will grow in the years 2023 and 2024. As for the other events, we have prospects for hosting at least 25 congresses with more than 1,500 participants, but we will rather be on an average of 2,600 participants. In October 2023, we will host the national congress of firefighters. It’s 600 exhibitors, 6,000 delegates over three days and 50,000 general public visitors to the open sequences. In the end, we expect a growth in turnover of 15% on the MEETT alone, each year. People have this need to see each other again, to see each other again. The event sector is back.