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Industry Influencer
Bellewaerde
Future proofing the industry Park World editor, Becci Knowles talks to Jakob Wahl, executive
director and vice president, IAAPA EMEA about what recent events have taught us.
T Jakob Whal
here is no doubt that as an industry, we have all missed meeting up at IAAPA Expos over the last 12 months, but I think we all agree that IAAPA has done a fantastic job of keeping members connected. For Jakob this means working on safety, government relations, education, industry data and obviously, events. “On this day in early March 12 months ago, we noticed the potential impact of Covid and had to work around it,” he says. “Initially, we had a spring/ summer event in May in Italy and then the Expo later that
year...one after another we had to cancel and that was the moment for us to shift our priorities. It took some time to organise everything, from walking away from London and having to deal with all the consequences for exhibitors, but also for us as an Association. It was a question of what we needed to do now to help our members. We asked ourselves, how we can shift away from organising events as a platform to create alternatives where people can exchange ideas, information and learn from each other, so we very quickly introduced the Community on Workplace platform where we have, I think 808 members right now.”
SPRING PART 1 2021
Explaining what is available on the platform and why it is of benefit to members, Jakob says, “We put in information about latest studies, about what is going on in the industry and created an environment in which members can ask questions about “how do you do this and what is your experience in that”. Roughly every three to four weeks we get together with members online, simply to talk about where they stand, what they have learnt, and what others can benefit from.” This, says Jakob, has been something of a silver lining over the past 12 months: “We are in a difficult situation all of us, but there’s something to learn from everyone so that’s been very helpful.” IAAPA also assisted members by providing a reopening guidance document with, says Jakob, “the help of some very experienced global operators. That was a great tool which was used by many members across the world.” He continues, “many of them actually took it as a policy document to go to governments and say, “these are the rules we are going to follow which will allow us to operate with the highest safety precautions” using countries further ahead in the reopening process that have followed the same set of guidelines as examples. This document was
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