Lady’s Guide to Attending the ITB Berlin Travel Trade Show

Today I want to share my guide to the ITB Berlin travel trade show in Germany with you. One of the leading events in the travel industry, this annual extravaganza takes place every March and is a great way to see the world and make new contacts.

ITB Berlin Travel Trade Show

Last November I went to the World Travel Market in London, a big travel trade show. In the three days I was there, I gallivanted around the globe, visiting countries from Africa to Asia and beyond.

I met some great hotels, tour operators, and travel companies, many of which I’ve since visited.

Not least among these is explora, the hotel company I stayed with in the Atacama Desert and Easter Island on my recent trip to Chile.

Having gotten so much out of the World Travel Market, I decided to continue attending trade shows. As such, I planned a trip to one of the largest travel trade shows in the world: ITB Berlin.

Taking place every year in the German capital, ITB attracts over 10,000 travel companies and 100,000 visitors from all over the world.

More than 185 countries exhibit the best of their tourism offerings in large, colorful pavilions over the course of the four days of the ITB Berlin travel trade show.

The show is so large there are buses to take attendees from one end of the Messe Berlin conference center to the other, and no less than three metro stations serve the entrances. It’s enormous. I couldn’t wait to go and see it for myself.

Attending ITB Berlin

I arrived in Berlin at noon on Wednesday and caught an airport shuttle just as it was leaving the airport for ITB.

The bus dropped me off at the south entrance of Messe Berlin, where I checked my coat and my bag, and walked into the show.

I’d written down a list of specific countries I wanted to visit—Andorra, Brazil, Cyprus, Cambodia, Malta, Mauritius, Peru, and others.

But when I walked into the first big room with its huge colorful pavilions, delicious plates of food, and costumed performers, I couldn’t help wanting to see the whole world.

Starting in Europe, I worked my way from Spain to Sweden, Iceland to Ireland. I passed by Romanian musicians playing traditional music, Dutchmen cooking up delicious-smelling stroopwafels, and Scotsmen clad in tartan kilts.

Mixed among them were Disney-esque characters in full costume and Madame Tussuads-like wax replicas of historical figures.

ITB being in Berlin, the German pavilions spanned several huge rooms. Every region, from Bavaria to Brandenburg, was represented.

Piano players serenaded us with the works of Franz Liszt, performers walked on stilts, and roulette tables were surrounded by hopeful betters.

As I walked through Europe, I talked with a tour company from Andorra, a range of hotels in Cyprus and Malta, the Serbian national tourist organization, an Icelandic spa, and the general manager of a hotel in Hamburg.

Throughout the day, I learned that Andorra can be reached from Barcelona in just three hours, Serbia has a thriving domestic wine industry, and Romania has hundreds of cycling routes starting in Cluj-Napoca and running throughout Transylvania.

Between countries, I stopped to rest at some of the many ITB Berlin travel trade show seminars. There were multiple rooms with all-day programs that ranged from travel technology to wellness and country-specific talks.

I went to one panel discussion on using social media for travel businesses, and another called the ITB World Travel Trends Report.

The former continued to beat the drum about mobile, which is a hot topic and has been touted as the future of the travel industry for quite some time.

The latter gave an interesting overview of the tourism industry with a particular focus on Europe, and offered very positive predictions for the coming year.

Speaking of Europe, by the time I left the ITB Berlin travel trade show that evening, I’d barely visited the whole continent.

In only two more days, I had to see the rest of the world. It was both intimidating and exciting, and I looked forward to going back the next day.

But first it was time to see as much of the real Berlin as I could outside the city’s large pavilion at ITB.

My guide in this endeavor was my boss from when I worked at Brown’s study abroad office my senior year of college. I hadn’t seen him in years, but our conversation picked up as if we’d met every day in the interim.

Our plan was to go to dinner, and he took me to a restaurant in Berlin that gave me a feel for the local scene. It was located in the northeast of the city, and had a unique pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth policy.

I’d seen a restaurant in London do this before as a marketing stunt, but my friend told me that in Berlin it was more of a tax-evasion stunt. He said it was common at restaurants throughout the city.

Over a great four-course dinner, he told me all about Berlin. He was getting his PhD in German history, so he was a particularly excellent source of knowledge.

When we weren’t discussing his research or our favorite works of art in our current cities’ respective plunder rooms (i.e. the British Museum and the Pergamon Museum), we talked about our experiences as expats.

We lamented the ever-changing visa rules of our respective countries and discussed our loves and frustrations with our adopted cultures. I went home that night happy to have caught up with him, and fell into bed dreaming of Europe.

The next morning I was up and off to explore the rest of the world. Day two at the ITB Berlin travel trade show started off with Asia. The whole continent was contained in two enormous rooms. 

I walked from country to country, talking to tour companies, hotel managers, and other representatives, all the while getting excited to travel more.

I met with a hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a place that’s high on my list of places to go. I also talked with a hotel in Hanoi, which, after visiting Ho Chi Minh City, is somewhere I really want to travel.

When I wasn’t meeting people, I was watching them. There was an artist painting huge canvasses in the Indonesia pavilion, performers getting ready for a show in the Mongolia one, and people wearing traditional dress in many other areas.

From Asia, I walked to Africa. There I met with a resort in Mauritius, an island nation about which I’ve heard amazing things.

And despite recent political turmoil, I was happy to see Egypt had an entire room in the show, complete with a giant sarcophagus head.

The Arab world was my next stop at the ITB Berlin travel trade show. True to form, everything was huge, ornate, and luxurious.

Airlines had their famous first class suites on display, and luxury hotels had huge pillowed pavilions. One company even had an impressive race car next to its information desk.

I stood for a while and watched as a man whittled a whirling wooden top with his feet, then turned around to find myself face-to-face with a knight riding on a great big white horse.

Following the Middle East, I hopped across a landing and found myself in the Americas at ITB. First came Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

The pavilions were decorated in everything from the Costa Rica rainforest to the St Lucia sea.

All around the room were performers dressed in elaborate indigenous costumes, women weaving on traditional looms, and stalls selling handicrafts.

In the next building at the ITB Berlin travel trade show was the rest of Latin America. Namely, South America.

From Brazil to Bolivia, the continent’s pavilions were bursting with life. I spent most of my time there talking with a company that got me excited about all the opportunities for adventure travel in Peru and Ecuador.

After half of the Americas and all of Asia, Africa, and the Arab world, I was exhausted. Having stupidly worn heels, my feet were killing me. My eyes were on sensory overload, too.

But I was an intrepid traveler, and there was still more of the world to see at the ITB Berlin travel trade show.

I took a short break to rest my feet, then continued my journey. Soon I found myself in India, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka.

I said hello to the giant boat that served as the gateway to the Maldives pavilion, then stumbled upon the Pacific Islands.

Tonga, Samoa, and Fiji were all present and accounted for, and a warrior from Papua New Guinea posed for a picture as I made my way towards New Zealand and Australia.

From there I jumped back to the other side of the Pacific at the ITB Berlin travel trade show. There I visited my home country and its continent.

As an American, it was interesting to see how the US pitched itself to the world as a tourism destination. As I wandered through the American-flag-filled pavilions, I was surprised to see how few places were represented.

If I hadn’t known any better, I might have thought the US consisted of five places: Orlando, Las Vegas, New York City, California, and a Native American reservation. Hmmm.

Then there were the types of companies present. The first one I noticed was an RV rental company that promoted seeing the USA by motor home.

There were a few tourism boards, some casinos—both of the Vegas variety and of the Native American variety—and amusement parks, complete with giant posters of The Simpsons.

Between the egregious use of the American flag, the disproportionate ratio of cowboy hats to states where people actually wear them, the industries represented, and the seemingly random representation of the geographical regions of the US, it wasn’t exactly the way I would’ve portrayed my country.

It made me wonder if people from other countries felt the same way about their own pavilions.

Still pondering, I passed Canada and found myself in the Ukraine pavilion. I was a bit confused given Ukraine’s lack of geographical proximity to Canada, but then I saw the Russia pavilion in the next room.

The Central Asia pavilions came next, and I met several companies offering expeditions throughout the under-visited region.

My energy flagging, I decided to hobble home from the ITB Berlin travel trade show in my ill-chosen shoes. I took the S-Bahn train back to my hotel, The Westin Grand, and changed into flats as fast as I could.

I did a bit of work, then caved into a growing sense of hunger. Inhaling a bowl of ravioli at a touristy Italian restaurant on Unter den Linden, I decided I would spend the evening taking it easy.

I walked over to Museum Island and took in the scene, then went back to The Westin Grand and fell into bed. It was 8pm. I got 12 hours of sleep. It was amazing.

I always knew traveling was exhausting, but seeing 188 countries in three days was in a category of its own. Getting tons of sleep was exactly what I needed to energize myself for my third and final day at the ITB Berlin travel trade show.

Having seen all the pavilions in the first two days, I decided to use my third day to re-visit some of the countries I hadn’t seen enough of in my first two.

I went back to the Peru pavilion, got information about Galapagos cruises in Ecuador, and took a virtual tour of Brazil.

I checked out one of the Tourism Companies rooms, where I met an agency that does travel PR in Germany, then availed myself of some free ice cream.

At that point it was time for me to leave the ITB Berlin travel trade show. I was sad to go, but happy to have met so many great companies during my time in Germany.

From tourism boards to hotels, tour companies to airlines, I left with the hope of working with all of them in the real world in the future.

Leaving ITB Berlin, I got back on the S-Bahn and traveled to the Hauptbahnhof to catch my train to another place in the real world: Prague.

The impossibly beautiful Bohemian city is four-and-a-half hours from Berlin by rail, and it was the next stop on my trip to Europe. To be continued…

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