Fira Barcelona Wins 2026 UFI Operations & Services Award

Fira Barcelona has been named winner of the 2026 UFI Operations & Services Award, with UFI recognising the venue’s ability to maintain safety, efficiency and operational quality while managing increasingly complex event delivery.

Announced on 24 September, this year’s award focused on “Operational Excellence Under Pressure”, highlighting organisations able to plan for demanding delivery conditions, manage resources effectively, coordinate teams, suppliers and stakeholders, and maintain reliable standards during periods of peak pressure.

Fira Barcelona’s winning entry demonstrated how the venue has developed a repeatable operational system to manage increasingly large, back-to-back events. The approach combines planning, collaboration and continuous improvement to maintain consistent delivery across complex event cycles.

Constantí Serrallonga, Fira de Barcelona General Manager, said: “This award is a significant recognition for Fira de Barcelona. It acknowledges our longstanding commitment to operational excellence and developing an operating model capable of meeting the demands and standards of the world’s leading organizers in terms of safety and efficiency.

It also strengthens our international position as a benchmark for world-class venues and services in the trade show and events industry, while inspiring us to continue raising the bar in everything we do.”

For UFI, the strength of the submission lay in its practical application. Stefan Eckert, UFI Operations & Services Working Group Chair, said: “This year, we received a very strong set of entries. Fira Barcelona impressed the jury with its comprehensive and highly practical approach to operational excellence under pressure.

By turning the challenge of increasingly large, back-to-back events into a repeatable operational system, they demonstrated how careful planning, collaboration and continuous improvement can enable a venue to operate more efficiently and safely. As we are always looking for best-practice examples from which the UFI community can learn, we felt this was a particularly strong and relevant case for our industry.”

The jury also named Dubai World Trade Centre and RX France as finalists.

The UFI Operations & Services Award is one of the UFI Awards, which recognise achievements across digital innovation, marketing, sustainable development, operations & services, people & culture, and industry partnerships. Selected projects are subsequently shared through UFI’s Best Practices Library, providing the wider exhibition community with examples of approaches and solutions that can be adapted across markets.

The 2026 UFI Award winners will be formally recognised at the 93rd UFI Global Congress, taking place from 2–5 November 2026 in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

For Fira Barcelona, the award highlights an operational model built not simply around successful individual events, but around the ability to deliver consistently when the scale, pace and complexity of exhibition activity increase.
 

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