FRANKFURT, Jan 31 — Despite hosting the world’s biggest automobile show for decades, Frankfurt will no longer be the venue for the International Motor Show (IAA), according to the show’s organising group, Verband der Automobilindustrie.
In recent years, the number of visitors attending car shows has been on the decline; not even the world’s biggest conference — the Frankfurt Motor Show (also known as the International Motor Show or the Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung) — is safe from the public’s increasing disinterest in the automotive industry.
In fact, after about a 30 per cent drop in attendance in 2019 compared with 2017, the show’s organising body, Verband der Automobilindustrie, announced that Frankfurt will no longer host the conference. Last year’s show saw only about 550,000 visitors while 810,000 attendees were present in 2017, and 931,000 in 2015.
Instead, the biennial conference will be moved to a new location in an attempt to draw in more visitors. After deliberating between seven cities, the organisation narrowed down the options to Berlin, Hamburg and Munich with a “decision on the city in which the IAA will take place from 2021” to be announced in upcoming weeks.
A run of about 70 years of the IAA being set in Frankfurt has officially come to an end, and though the IAA conference will continue to live on, the days of it being the Frankfurt Motor Show are over. — AFP
