A Guide to Food Hotel Tech for First-Time Exhibitors
Food Hotel Tech is the technology and corporate-responsibility fair for the French hotel and restaurant sector, and the 2027 edition runs on 31 March and 1 April at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, Hall 7.1. It opens 09:00–18:00 on the Wednesday and 09:00–17:30 on the Thursday. The show was founded in 2017 and 2027 is its tenth edition.
One change is worth knowing before you plan. The show joined the Easyfairs group in 2026, announced at the ninth edition, which ran on 14–15 April 2026 and drew 230 exhibitors, around 8,700 visitors and 36 conference sessions. New ownership usually means a revised exhibitor manual, and sometimes a revised stand-package structure. Read the 2027 manual rather than working from what a colleague remembers of 2025.
Who Exhibits and What the Visitor Came to Do
The floor covers property-management and booking systems, point-of-sale and payment, kitchen technology and robotics, staff scheduling and human-resources tools, data and artificial intelligence, and the energy, waste and sourcing side of corporate responsibility. Alongside the established vendors there is a start-up village, which is a real part of the show's character rather than a corner of it.
The visitor is an operator: someone who runs one hotel, a small group, a restaurant chain or a franchise network, and who signs for software rather than specifying it for someone else. That shortens the sales conversation and changes what it needs. They will not ask for an architecture diagram. They will ask what it costs per room or per cover, how long installation takes, what happens to their existing system, and whether their staff can use it without a week of training. A stand that answers those four questions before anyone speaks does more qualifying work than any amount of styling.
Designing a Stand for a Product Nobody Can Touch
A software product has no shelf presence. There is no machine humming, no sample to hand over, nothing that stops someone at three metres. What stops people is a single legible statement of what the product does for a hotel or a restaurant, written large enough to read while walking, and then a way to sit down and be shown it.
That gives the stand two zones rather than one. The aisle-facing zone is a headline and a mounted screen at standing eye level, running a short loop rather than a live session — a live demonstration on a high screen is unreadable and unrepeatable. The interior zone is seated: a surface at the right height, two chairs, a monitor angled for two people rather than an audience, power and cable management under the surface, and enough acoustic separation that a fifteen-minute conversation is possible while the aisle is loud. Four seated positions on a 48 m² stand will out-perform a stage on the same footprint at this show, because nobody buys a property-management system from a presentation.
Two practical constraints sit underneath all of that. Hall lighting will reflect off any screen you mount without planning the angle, and a demonstration that depends on shared hall wireless will fail at the worst moment. Both are solved at design stage — one with screen positioning, one with a wired line ordered from the venue and an offline fallback built into the demo itself.
Stand Size: 9, 18, 24 and 48 Square Metres on a Two-Day Floor
Nine square metres works for a single-product vendor or a start-up. You get a back wall, a counter and one demo position, and conversations happen standing. It is genuinely enough to launch a product here, which is not true at most of the shows we build.
Eighteen square metres is the point at which you can have a seated demonstration and a second person still working the aisle, and it is the size most established software vendors should be looking at first. Twenty-four adds a semi-private corner, which matters if your conversation involves a customer's actual numbers.
Forty-eight square metres supports three or four seated positions plus a meeting area, and suits a group showing several products or anyone demonstrating physical kitchen equipment alongside software. From 60 m² upward you are building a hospitality suite rather than a stand, which some exhibitors do here deliberately — but on a two-day floor that decision should be made on meeting capacity, not on presence.
What a Food Hotel Tech Stand Costs by Size
Ranges below are all-in for design, fabrication, graphics, road freight from Frankfurt, installation and dismantling. They exclude the floor space rental you pay the organiser, and the electrical and network orders placed with the venue.
- 9 m² modular: €4,100–€8,700
- 18 m² modular: €4,800–€10,100
- 24 m² custom with two seated demo positions: €11,500–€15,000
- 30 m² custom with semi-private meeting corner: €15,000–€19,000
- 48 m² custom with four demo positions: €19,000–€26,000
- 60 m² and above, premium build: €34,000–€44,000
Common Mistakes, in Order of Frequency
The most common is a laptop on a counter, which shows passing traffic a closed lid instead of a proposition. The second is assuming hall wireless will carry a live demonstration, which it will not by the middle of the first morning. The third is designing panels for the render rather than for the goods lift that serves an upper-level hall, which turns into cutting in a loading bay. The fourth is spending on a single-use structure for sixteen hours of floor time when a reusable frame costs less across two editions. The fifth is treating the corporate-responsibility theme as someone else's topic while exhibiting on a stand that will be scrapped on Thursday evening. Every one of them is settled at design stage or not at all.
Getting Started
Send your stand size, your hall position if the organiser has issued it, and a short description of what you are demonstrating — how many people need to sit down at once, whether any physical equipment is coming, and whether the demo can run without a live connection. Those three answers shape the design more than any styling preference. You get a 3D design and an itemised all-in quote, at no charge and with no obligation.
A two-day show is the strongest argument we know for a frame you keep. The structure comes back to our Frankfurt warehouse afterwards, and the next edition costs a graphics refresh rather than a rebuild — which also answers the sustainability question this particular floor will ask you. Our modular exhibition stands are built for exactly that pattern.
