Venues

The 68 exhibitions comprise 25 own exhibitions and 43 third-party exhibitions. They attracted a total of 11,372 exhibiting companies and around 1.5 million visitors. They occupied a gross exhibition area of more than one million square metres – the equivalent of around 160 football pitches. Several events were held for the first time in 2018, including Grand Basel, Criterion in Zurich and Aventure Expo in Lausanne.

With 35 congresses and 154 additional events, the Congress Center Basel recorded a very high capacity utilisation in the 2018 financial year. The highlights included major international events, such as the DIA Euromeeting 2018, the 24th European Congress on Sleep Research and the Linux Cloud Foundry Summit Europe. These – and other – events all brought several thousand foreign participants to the city of Basel for a number of days. The Annual Conference of the Association for Medical Education was attended by almost 4,000 medical professionals from all over the world.

The two musical theatres in Basel and Zurich also recorded gratifying occupancy rates, with a total of 357 performances attracting 316,900 visitors.

As per 1 July 2018, the MCH Group transferred responsibility for the operation and marketing of the Lausanne exhibition site to the Fondation de Beaulieu. The details for the Lausanne venue thus only contain the third-party exhibitions for the first half of the year.