The organisers of ICE Totally Gaming, the big London trade show for casino and online gaming, are awaiting the final word from the independent auditors – but it appears that the attendance at this year’s event (February 7-9) will be a new record high.
For the first time, ICE has broken through the 30,000-barrier, with an unofficial count of 30,213 attendees. It is the sixth year in succession that ICE has seen its attendance grow and the number is 5.7 per cent up on the record set last year.
Kate Chambers, managing director of the gaming division at Clarion Events, said: “While these are outline figures and are subject to independent audit, we are confident that they represent an accurate snapshot of the three days of intense business, networking and learning which took place at the ExCeL exhibition centre.”
The upward movement in attendance has coincided with the move to the London Docklands location in 2013. ICE is now 42 per cent larger in terms of attendance than it was at its height in Earls Court.
She added: “Not only are more gaming professionals attending ICE than ever before, encouragingly, they are also spending more time within the show.
"Our figures demonstrate the average time spent within the exhibition is 1.96 days, an increase of 0.5 per cent on 2016. When this figure is extrapolated out, the number of visitor days at ICE 2017 totalled 59,217.
"Although the attendance figures are extremely important, my attention is now on the data we obtain from the post-show independent research that we commission each year and, in particular, the results of the Net Promoter Score metric which gauges the willingness of participants to recommend the event to a friend or colleague.
"The NPS, which is used by serious consumer brands including Amazon, Apple and eBay, is a measure of customer satisfaction which in turn reflects the ‘mood music’ of the industry and the relationship they enjoy with the ICE brand.” The audited attendance, including a country analysis, will be available late March.
