Your event is three weeks out. The registration system shows one set of exhibitor names. Your CRM has slightly different ones. The event platform (the main portal thousands of attendees will open on their phones) has a third version. Somewhere in between, a VIP sponsor’s logo is wrong, a session assignment is missing, and your team is manually copying data between systems at midnight.
During a single-city event with 500 attendees, that’s manageable. Painful, but manageable.
For IAAPA, an association running 4 major international exhibitions and over 30 side events every year across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North America, and beyond, it was becoming impossible.
IAAPA (International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions) is the global trade association for the attractions industry, representing thousands of members across more than 100 countries. Their flagship events – IAAPA Expo Asia, IAAPA Expo Europe, and IAAPA Expo in Orlando – are among the largest trade shows in their sector, bringing together exhibitors, sponsors, and industry professionals from around the world.
Each event runs on its own set of tools: a AMS for member data, a separate registration platform for ticketing, a floor plan system for exhibitor mapping, and IAAPA Connect+ (the branded event platform) as the unified experience for attendees.
The challenge? None of these systems speak the same language. And every event, in every country, adds another layer of singularity.
Before the partnership with EPEAK Studio, getting clean, consistent data into IAAPA Connect+ required extensive manual work before every event. Staff had to reconcile exhibitor profiles from multiple sources, catch mismatches by hand, update records across systems individually, and hope nothing slipped through.
The consequences of a slip weren’t trivial. Wrong exhibitor categories meant attendees couldn’t find who they were looking for. Missing session assignments meant the wrong people in the wrong rooms. Data errors in the app meant friction at exactly the moment when the experience needed to be seamless.
And with events running on different continents, in different time zones, with different local requirements, the complexity only multiplied.
EPEAK Studio designed and implemented an automated data integration layer that sits between all of IAAPA’s systems – reconciling, validating, and synchronizing data so that IAAPA Connect+ always reflects a single, reliable version of the truth.
This isn’t off-the-shelf software. It’s a custom-built integration that understands the specific quirks of each system IAAPA uses, the specific structure of their membership and ticketing data, and the specific requirements of each event.
In practice, this automated data integration means:
Consistency: A unified attendee and exhibitor experience across every IAAPA event, regardless of where it takes place
Reliability: Data issues are caught weeks before the event, not discovered on setup day
Scalability: New events are spun up using the same proven framework, without rebuilding from scratch
Focus: The IAAPA team focuses on the event itself, not on the systems running underneath it
Headquartered in Paris and founded by three childhood friends, Swapcard offers a combination of virtual and hybrid events, event mobile and web app, meeting and matchmaking software and an exhibitor retrieval system. As of late 2019, Swapcard has offices in Dubai and Canada, and was in the process of opening offices in the United States.
