Life in Transit: More Than Just the Journey

For many in the wire and cable industry, travel has become a familiar rhythm rather than an occasional novelty.

It starts early, with alarm clocks set before sunrise, airport terminals that blur into one another, and hotel rooms that briefly double as offices. Emails are answered in departure lounges, calls are taken across time zones, and conversations often resume exactly where they left off, just in a different country. Sometimes mid-sentence.

There is an efficiency to business travel that comes with experience. Suitcases are packed in record time. Chargers are never forgotten, usually because forgetting one once is enough for a lifetime. Certain unwritten rules are learned early. Never rely on hotel Wi Fi. Always allow extra time at unfamiliar airports. Accept that airport coffee is less a luxury and more a survival strategy.

But while travel can feel routine, the reason for it never is.

In a global industry, exhibitions remain one of the few moments where digital communication gives way to something more valuable. Face to face interaction. Conversations happen not just in meeting rooms, but on stand aisles, over coffee, during chance encounters, and in moments that simply cannot be scheduled into a diary. Or replicated on a video call with a frozen screen and muted microphone.

These interactions matter. Relationships are strengthened not through email threads or carefully worded follow ups, but through shared time, shared experiences and genuine connection. It is often the discussion between meetings, rather than the meeting itself, that leaves the strongest impression. Sometimes it is the conversation that starts with “we only have five minutes” that lasts the longest.

Yet for many business travellers, cities are experienced in fragments. Airports, hotels, exhibition halls and taxis form a familiar loop, with little opportunity to see anything beyond them. You can visit the same city five times and still only know the route between the hotel and the venue. The outside world exists somewhere beyond the exhibition hall doors.

This is why networking events play such an important role alongside exhibitions.

They offer a pause in the schedule. A moment to step outside the exhibition hall, to reconnect in a different setting, and to experience something of the place you have travelled to. That might mean watching a city light up from a rooftop as the day finally slows down, drifting past a skyline on the water after a busy show floor, or stepping into an outdoor setting filled with colour, music and local culture. Moments that remind you that you are somewhere new, not just somewhere busy.

At IWMA, this is exactly why networking events are planned as more than just gatherings. Locations are chosen deliberately, not only for convenience, but to offer members a chance to see a little of the world beyond the show floor. Adding a cultural element, a distinctive setting or a memorable experience turns a busy business trip into something more human, and often far more memorable.

In a diary filled with flights, meetings and deadlines, these moments stand out. They remind us that while travel may be repetitive, the connections are not.

Life in transit is not always glamorous. But in a global industry built on relationships, it remains essential. Not just for doing business, but for remembering why face to face still matters.