A Guide to SantExpo for First-Time Exhibitors
SantExpo is the annual event of the French hospital and medico-social sector, organised by the Fédération Hospitalière de France, with GL Events running the exhibitor side. The 2027 edition takes place from Tuesday 25 to Thursday 27 May at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, in Hall 1. Doors open at 09:00 each day and close at 18:00 on Tuesday and Wednesday and 17:00 on Thursday. Entry is free for professionals but requires registration in advance, and the badge is named.
Alongside the exhibition floor the organiser runs a substantial programme: FHF conferences and Agoras, expert trails, themed villages, start-up pitches and the Innovation Trophies. For a large share of the audience that programme is the reason for the trip, and planning your stand around it rather than against it is the single most useful thing a first-time exhibitor can do.
The Display-to-Meeting Ratio Inverts at SantExpo
On most trade fair floors the stand is a shop window. You maximise frontage, you pull people in from the aisle, you have a conversation standing up, you capture a contact, and the transaction happens somewhere else later. That model is built for a buyer who can decide, or at least recommend, on their own authority.
SantExpo is not that. A French public hospital buys through a public tender: a written specification, a published procedure, a scoring grid, an evaluation committee. Nobody on this floor can hand you an order, and everybody knows it. What they can do — and what they came to do — is meet the supplier, look at the product properly, ask the awkward questions in private, and leave with material solid enough to put in front of a committee.
That inverts the design brief. Frontage still matters, but it matters as a filter rather than as a funnel: it should tell the wrong visitor to keep walking as efficiently as it tells the right one to stop. The floor area that would go into display on a commercial stand goes here into seated capacity — a table, chairs, a surface, and if the budget allows a door. From 24 m² upward we would nearly always advise an enclosed room over a larger open display, because a procurement conversation held in the middle of the aisle is a conversation held in front of your competitor's staff.
The practical planning method is simple. Estimate how many meetings you want to hold across the three days, divide by the roughly eighteen usable hours the show actually offers once the conference peaks are accounted for, and that gives you the number of simultaneous seated positions you need. Two positions is the realistic minimum for anyone taking this show seriously. Four is where a mid-sized manufacturer usually lands. Design the display around what is left, not the other way round.
Who Exhibits at SantExpo and Who Actually Signs
The exhibitor side spans hospital equipment and medical devices, hospital information systems and health software, building and fit-out for care facilities, furniture, logistics and sterilisation, medico-social and elder-care solutions, mutual insurers and financing, and the public operators and professional federations that sit around all of it. Start-ups occupy a visible share of the floor through the organiser's innovation areas.
The visitor side is where SantExpo differs most from a commercial healthcare show. Hospital general directors and their management teams, biomedical and technical services engineers, information-system directors, heads of purchasing, medico-social establishment managers, regional health bodies and public purchasing groups. These are institutional roles inside institutional budgets, and the person you are talking to is very often assembling a case rather than making a purchase.
That has a direct consequence for what you put on the wall. Certifications and conformity marks, referencing through a public purchasing group, existing framework agreements, French manufacture or assembly where it genuinely applies, interoperability with the systems a French hospital already runs, and total cost over a realistic service life — these are the things that survive into a procurement file. A product photograph and a tagline do not. The organiser maintaining a dedicated Made in France area is a fair signal of how often that particular question comes up here.
Stand Size: 9, 18, 24 and 48 Square Metres, Measured in Seats
Nine square metres gives you a counter, a back wall and standing conversations. It is the right size for an association, a regional service provider or a first-time exhibitor testing whether the audience is really theirs. What you cannot do at nine is sit anyone down, and on this floor that is a genuine limitation rather than a stylistic one.
Eighteen square metres is the first size where a seated position fits without wrecking the display. One table, two or three chairs, a counter and a back wall. This is where most first serious SantExpo stands sit, and it works provided you accept that meetings are open and audible.
Twenty-four is the threshold for an enclosed room. You lose display area to walls, and the stand looks smaller than a 24 m² open build — but you gain a private conversation, which is what the audience actually came for. If you are selling anything with a tender attached, we would take the room over the frontage every time.
At 48 m² you can run two enclosed rooms, or one room plus a proper demonstration position, and still have staff free at the aisle. This is the size at which a stand stops queueing. From 80 m² upward a double-decker adds meeting capacity on the upper level without eating the ground-floor area, which suits purchasing groups and consortium stands hosting several partners under one identity.
What a SantExpo Stand Costs by Size
Ranges below are all-in for design, fabrication, French-language graphics, road freight, install and dismantle. They exclude the floor space rental you pay to the organiser, and the electrical, network and rigging orders placed through the venue services portal.
- 9 m² modular: €4,100–€8,700
- 18 m² modular with one open seated position: €4,800–€10,100
- 24 m² custom with an enclosed meeting room: €11,500–€15,000
- 30 m² custom with a room and a demonstration position: €15,000–€19,000
- 48 m² custom with two enclosed rooms: €19,000–€26,000
- 80 m² premium or double-decker: €34,000–€48,000
Common Mistakes, in Order of Frequency
The most common is designing for frontage and discovering on day one that there is nowhere to hold a meeting — a mistake that cannot be fixed on site and costs you the show's whole purpose. The second is building the stand in English or German for a domestic French public-sector audience. The third is treating free admission as free qualified footfall, and staffing to greet everyone rather than to sort. The fourth is filling the wall with product benefit copy when what the visitor needs is the certification and referencing information that will survive into a tender file. The fifth is planning the stand as though the aisles are uniformly busy, when the conference programme empties and refills them on a predictable rhythm. Every one of these is settled at design stage or not at all.
There is a sixth that is less about the stand than the follow-up: turning up with no way to log what was agreed in a meeting. A procurement conversation produces actions — send the specification, confirm the framework reference, arrange a site visit — and if those are written on the back of a badge scan they are gone by June.
Getting Started
Send us your stand size, your hall and stand number once the organiser has issued it, and the one number that shapes the design more than any other: how many seated meetings you want to be able to hold at the same time. Tell us whether those meetings need to be private. If you have a product that needs a demonstration position, send its dimensions and power draw as well.
You get a 3D design and an itemised all-in quote back, at no charge and with no obligation. If the answer is that your requirement does not fit the footprint you have booked, we will say so at that stage rather than after the drawings are approved.
Because SantExpo returns to the same hall every May, a reusable system frame is a particularly sensible purchase here — the structure stays in our Frankfurt warehouse between editions and the next year costs a graphics refresh and a road run rather than a rebuild. Our modular exhibition stands are built for exactly that pattern.
