UFI, The Global Association of the Exhibition Industry, has named accommodation provider bnetwork as the winner of its 2026 UFI Industry Partners Award.
The UFI Industry Partners Award celebrates outstanding initiatives and organisations that demonstrate innovation, collaboration and forward-thinking approaches that elevate partnerships and strengthen the exhibition ecosystem. This year’s Award topic was ‘The Biggest Lesson Learnt: From Zero to Hero’ and aimed to spotlight initiatives where industry partners and their collaborators turned adversity into opportunity, creating value for stakeholders and the broader exhibition industry.
Stephane Teboul, co-founder of bnetwork, commented: “This project showed that accommodation can be much more than a logistical requirement; it can play a genuinely strategic role in the successful relocation and longterm development of a major international event. We are extremely proud of what we achieved together with Clarion Gaming, Barcelona’s hotel community and all the partners who helped make this possible.”
Sebastian Witt, chair of the UFI Industry Partners Working Group, added: bnetwork’s winning entry stood out to the jury for its highly strategic use of partnership to solve a real industry challenge: the relocation of a flagship event. This year’s competition featured many good entries, with two shortlisted as finalists and four recognised as best practices. bnetwork’s submission scored well across every criterion. The jury was particularly impressed by the initiative’s innovation in engaging partners across the ecosystem, exactly the kind of forward-thinking collaboration this award was created to celebrate, and saw strong potential for the model to be applied by other large international events.”
Selected projects from the UFI Awards are shared through UFI’s Best Practices Library. Discover more at www.ufi.org/awards.
The 2026 UFI Award winners will be recognised at the 93rd UFI Global Congress, 2–5 November 2026 in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
