I believe I attended my first International Hotel/Motel & Restaurant Show in New York City in 1989. At that time the show was huge with two levels of New York’s Javits Center occupied. There were more than 1,000 exhibitors each year for years and the food and foodservice section went on and on. You could grab lunch and dinner by grabbing samples during a stroll up and down the show aisles. Even the hotel school area was large.
In my early years attending the show, I worked for Hotel & Motel management magazine and helped them produce “show dailies”. It was a time when polaroid cameras were used to photograph exhibitors and the final version of the dailies had to be driven to the printer. It was a great experience for a young journalist, and I have good memories of those times. At that time, few talked about sustainability and few exhibitors focused on or highlighted saving energy, water and reducing waste.
I kept going for years and continued as I developed and published Green Lodging News. Eventually the event was renamed HX: The Hotel Experience and presented side by side with Boutique Design New York (BDNY). The event was also sold. In recent years HX kept getting smaller and BDNY kept getting larger. It was clear years ago that BDNY, focused on a very hip part of our industry, had a much greater vibe than HX. In fact, HX pretty much had zero vibe, but I kept attending because “green” suppliers had become more common over the years. It was a good place to network and find new business.
Show Kept on Shrinking
Last year, HX had gotten so small that it really could not be considered its own show. Quite sad but that is business.
It really came as no surprise then this past week when the owners of HX, Emerald X, announced that this November’s HX had been postponed until a later date.
“This decision was made as part of a comprehensive review of the event’s overall future direction, with the aim of determining the next chapter as the hospitality industry continues to grow and change,” Emerald X said. “As part of this process, HX: The Hotel Experience will conduct a global research initiative and gather input from industry stakeholders, i.e., owners, operators, brands, developers, franchisees, etc. The project will be conducted with results tabulated and analyzed to inform organizers’ decision-making and assist in developing an improved event model that better serves the industry.”
I will be quite surprised if we see HX again—at least under that name. The Hospitality Show, planned for later this month and put on by AHLA and Questex’s Hotel Management publication, will be very much what HX used to be.
Believe it or not, HX, under its current and previous name, was held more than 100 years.
