Originally, this event was scheduled for 2021 in Toronto, but had to be postponed, thanks to Covid-19. As a consequence it has been 9 years since the ACI-NA Annual Conference & Exhibition had been held jointly with ACI World – usually this is every 5 years.
It was a big event with over 2,600 attendees, compared with around 2,000 who usually attend an ACI-NA Annual.
It also so happened that the Toronto Blue Jays made the World Series for the first time since 1993 – this is, effectively, the baseball ‘cup final’ series and is played over the best of seven games. (The standing joke is that it can be called a “World Series” because there is one Canadian team!)
Clearly this was a big deal for all Canadians.
Rogers Centre, the stadium which houses the Blue Jays games, is unusual in many ways. It stands in the shadow of the CN Tower. It has a domed roof, which can open and close. The Marriott Hotel bar, and some of the guest rooms, actually form part of the stadium allowing some guests to watch the game from the comfort of their rooms (or the bar). The conference centre also stands in the shadow of the CN Tower and guess at which hotel we were staying!!!!
Toronto hosted the first two games, 24th & 25th October – which just happened to be the Friday before the pre-conference started on Saturday 25th. We arrived at the Marriott on Friday to total bedlam! Security checks to even enter the hotel and they were charging for a seat in the hotel bar, regardless of whether you were staying there.
Happily, there were few fans around when we had to make our way to the conference centre the first two mornings – they got to sleep off the late-night partying which had kept some of us awake until 2.30am! It was a relief when the whole “roadshow” headed to LA for games 3, 4 and 5 – and we escaped before they returned to Toronto for games 6 & 7. (The LA Dodgers ultimately won in game 7).
Amongst all that excitement, how was the show?!
As stated above, very well attended.
Of the total attendees there were 717 airport representatives, of whom 264 were from Canada and 392 from the US. This is not entirely surprising as many airports restrict foreign travel so the Canadians took advantage of the show being in Canada while many Americans had to stay home. The 61 non-US/Canada represented every other continent, except Australasia. Africa, in particular, was well-represented, possibly indicating that the more tourist-orientated countries are considering updating their infrastructure?
Topics for the BIT (Business IT) Committee meeting included AI (traditional and Gen), Cyber and GIS. Cyber remains one of the biggest areas of concern for airport CIOs and has led to some pulling technology out of the Cloud and back ‘on prem’. Clearly, while traditional AI can be a great tool for data analytics, GenAI has potential to create massive cyber security risks and I think we can expect to see airports implementing more and more controls to stop their end users downloading unwisely and risking one – or more – of the airport networks.
Moving on to the exhibition. Traffic to our booth was fairly steady during exhibition hours. We were able to make some useful new contacts – as well as reconnecting with old friends – and had a number of good conversations, which are keeping the sales team busy with follow ups.
Not that we stereotyped Canadians (lol) – but Toronto is home to the Hockey Hall of Fame (and the Stanley Cup) – so we went with a hockey theme for both our duck and our booth uniform (yes, I know, if we had thought it through then we would have stood in number order….)
And all the ducks found new homes!
On to Philadelphia next year, which will be making a big deal celebrating the semiquincentennial because it was the city where the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
Now we just have to find the right duck…..
