CASE STUDY
MEES 2025: Platform Maturity in Practice
How Informa Connect took full ownership of event tech delivery in its third year with Visit
7.372
Visitors
83%
Connection Rate
17.956
Touchpoint Activations
3 Years
Of Partnership
135.880
Proffesional Visits
19.629
unique leads captured
$1.82B USD
Business Value
The Middle East Event Show (MEES) is the region’s dedicated trade event for the events industry, bringing together suppliers, organisers, and professionals from across the Middle East and beyond. The 2025 edition was organised by Informa Connect and marked the third consecutive year the show has run on the Visit platform.
Visit provided the full technology stack across the event lifecycle: registration, badging, access control, lead capture, participant networking, and real-time analytics.
By its third year, the Informa Connect team had built working familiarity with the Visit platform. The question for 2025 was whether that familiarity could translate into full operational ownership, and what that would take.
Organiser-led pre-event setup.
Informa Connect wanted to manage the entire pre-event configuration independently: platform setup, data onboarding, exhibitor communications, and app preparation.
For that to work, the platform had to be intuitive enough to operate without continuous vendor input, and the team had to be confident enough to make decisions without a support dependency.
Participant engagement at scale.
This edition introduced a broader engagement layer:
- NFC smart badges
- Touchpoints embedded across the show floor
- A gamified competition
- Visit Discover app for attendee networking.
Deploying these tools alongside registration and access control, within a unified system, required a configuration that worked cohesively rather than as separate modules stitched together.
Visit’s role in 2025 shifted deliberately. The pre-event work sat entirely with the Informa Connect team. Visit focused on on-site delivery, remaining available for support and training where needed, but the operational centre of gravity had moved to the organiser.
How we did it
A Platform Built for Organiser Independence
The configuration work for MEES 2025 (data structuring, app content, exhibitor onboarding, and visitor messaging) was completed by the Informa Connect team directly, without reliance on Visit to manage or mediate each step. This was a direct function of platform design: the Visit back-end is built to be navigated by event teams, not only by specialists.
For a partnership in its third year, this is the expected direction of travel. Organisers who know the platform should be able to use it fully. The role of the technology partner is to make that possible, then get out of the way.
A Unified Engagement Stack, Fully Deployed
On site, Visit delivered the complete platform across every participant touchpoint. The full technology stack deployed at MEES 2025 included:
- Registration and smart badge printing
- Access control with real-time monitoring
- Lead capture via the Visit Connect app
- NFC smart badges and touchpoints for lead capture and content sharing
- Visit Discover app for participant networking
- Gamification and real-time reporting
All of these ran from a single platform. Attendees moved through entrances, interacted with exhibitors, connected with peers, and collected content, all through one connected system. For exhibitors, lead data flowed directly into the app. For organisers, every interaction was visible in real time.
Gamification to Drive Adoption
To accelerate app adoption and encourage broad platform engagement, a gamified competition ran across the event. Attendees earned points for each touchpoint interaction, for connecting with an exhibitor, and for connecting with another visitor. The top three scorers received Amazon gift vouchers of 800 AED, 600 AED, and 400 AED, respectively.
The competition served a practical purpose beyond prizes: it gave attendees a reason to use every part of the platform, which in turn produced richer data and higher engagement rates across the board.
The outcome
The numbers across MEES 2025 reflected both the scale of deployment and the depth of adoption:
7,372 total attendees, 83% made at least one connection during the event, 17,956 touchpoint activations, with 96% of visitors engaging at least once, 21,894 lead capture scans, averaging 3.58 per visitor
