He's exaggerating some stuff and there's a lot of bias in his post. I don't work for SIA/OR, nor do I have any sort of stake in what they do other than the fact that I've bounced around the industry for a while and am in the midst of starting a new retail business in it, so technically I am one class of customer these shows seek to serve, while the manufacturers are a different type of client/partner.

Neither show did a great job of giving accessibility to smaller brands over the last few years, but it wasn't necessarily down to one of the two being more affordable or objectively better than the other from the standpoint of a manufacturer/exhibitor. Really the biggest problem, if you asked any reps at the show, was that it had turned into this thing where companies didn't know how to deploy their resources the best as these shows started multiplying and going regional.

Without getting too political about it, suffice it to say that a handful of companies with mega budgets (think Patagonia, Atomic, Smith, etc) would send exhibitors to EVERY event, then smaller companies or ones with an axe to grind about the whole thing would elect one over the other and then broadcast their feelings about it (Black Diamond did a bit of this, later Patagonia and some others, which is probably what ended up pushing this consolidation move over the top as much as anything). Still more smaller companies elected to forego formal exhibiting altogether and began organizing renegade events that happened in the general vicinity of the shows, but that the companies could execute for a fraction of the cost. For instance, last year I went to 4 different unauthorized "booths" set up by manufacturer reps in hotel rooms across the street from the Denver convention center. Those were the most fun ones to go to, they always had hard liquor.

By this year, it had become such a heated situation with a lot of companies being forced to pick which trade show seemed like the best fit at the expense of potentially losing out on some regional business, as well as regional retailers and smaller online players not knowing which were the best shows to send buyers to. It really had become a total clusterfuck, and a lot of smaller manufacturers and buyers had begun to opt out of the whole tradeshow scene altogether for various reasons, and I'm getting a bit of that vibe from the comment above...maybe he's got experience as a rep for a smaller manufacturer, I don't know.

I'm genuinely excited for the shift, though. This next show is likely going to be the biggest of its kind in the history of the winter sports industry, and it'll be cool to see if it brings back a lot of the vibe of the earlier events. I'm expecting a lot of smaller companies to come back out of the cold and actually participate again regardless of the expense, since one consolidated show takes most of the guesswork out of how to handle what was starting to become a very crowded and stressful tradeshow "season" with so many events.