Disha Shah Ghosh - Mumbai After making its debut at the Jio Convention Centre in Mumbai’s business hub of BKC, Melange is set to move to the upcoming state-of-the-art exhibition space at Nesco for its 2025 edition.
The inaugural show, termed as a table-top exhibition with a standardised layout for all exhibitors without any grandeur, Melange has pleasantly surprised the trade fraternity in Mumbai. Organised within a couple of months since ideation, the trade show stuck to its ethos of offering a platform to engage in business discussions rather than an over-the-top branding exercise with unfiltered visitors.
Continuing with its two-day format, Melange 2025 will be held on September 20 and 21, with the organisers wanting to make it an annual feature.
While the inaugural edition saw 126 exhibitors comprising airlines, hotels, DMCs, cruise liners, tourism boards, representation companies, what set it apart was the stringent measures in place to restrict the entry of buyers and visitors. Clearly, the idea was to make it a quality show over unregulated quantity of visitors.
Besides Mumbai, buyers from nearby Pune and Gujarat saw major participation. For 2025, the show will be bigger and better, as echoed by the MTF management.
For the next edition, some key takeaways from the inaugural would be to restrict the entertainment quotient during the business hours, and better turnaround time of the catering facility to avoid serpentine queues. This will allow the upcoming edition to better regulate the crowd since the vision it to make it a larger event with a pan India trade participation.
What worked in the advantage of Melange this time was the spacious floor plan, standardised stall set-up and the networking programme just being an extension in the same pavilion post business hours.
Since the focus is on business engagement and exploring partnerships, the absence of a conference programme didn’t feel like much of a miss.
