Competitive Socialising is No Longer Simply a Trend

From the floor at IAAPA London – Anders Foss, Head of Brand & Marketing, TSGG

What IAAPA Expo Europe 2026 said about where competitive socialising is heading.

IAAPA Expo Europe in London was the largest in the event’s history. For those of us who have been watching competitive socialising develop as a category, it was also the edition where something shifted.

Not dramatically. Not with an announcement. But perceptibly – in what was on the programme, in the conversations happening on the show floor, and in who was showing up.

From show floor to strategic agenda

For the first time, competitive socialising had a formal place in IAAPA’s programme – not as a product demonstration, not as a niche session tucked into a side room, but as part of the industry’s main strategic conversation. When an industry’s largest European trade show formally programmes a category, it stops being a trend. It becomes part of the landscape that operators, investors, and venue designers have to account for.

IAAPA also added dedicated networking receptions for Poland and France this year – two markets where competitive socialising is still establishing itself. For TSGG, those are not new names on a map. They are markets we have been building knowledge and partnerships in for some time. Seeing the wider industry formalise its attention on the same markets is a different kind of signal: confirmation that the direction we moved in is the direction the category is moving.

When a trend gets its own place in the programme at the industry’s largest European trade show, it stops being a trend.

The signal I wasn’t expecting

I spent a good part of the show not at our booth but walking the floor – watching our sales team work, talking to operators, listening to conversations happening around the exhibition. It gave me a useful vantage point.

The observation I keep coming back to: I had open, genuine conversations with competitors. Companies building products in the same space as TSGG, willing to compare notes, share perspective, talk about the category rather than their position in it.

I won’t go into the specifics of those conversations. But the fact that they happened at all says something important about where competitive socialising is as a category.

Categories where competitors talk openly to each other are not categories where everyone is fighting over a fixed pool of customers. They are categories where the people closest to the opportunity – the ones with the most to lose from being wrong – believe the market is still expanding. Sharing knowledge makes sense when you think the opportunity ahead is bigger than the competition today.

That collective confidence is not something you can manufacture. It comes from what companies are actually seeing in the field: operators signing on, venues performing, guests returning. The conversations at IAAPA reflected that.

IAAPA Expo Europe 2026 in London was the largest in the event’s history.

IAAPA, September 2026

What this means for operators

The practical implication of all of this is straightforward, even if the timing is not. Operators who have been watching competitive socialising from the sidelines – curious, perhaps cautious, waiting to see whether it holds – are watching a category that is no longer auditioning. It is part of the hospitality conversation at the highest industry level. The operators moving now are not early adopters taking a risk. They are reading the same signals the rest of the industry is reading, and acting on them.

The question has shifted. It is no longer ‘is this a real category?’ It is ‘what is the right entry point for my venue, my market, my guest?’ That is a much more interesting question. And one TSGG is set up to help operators answer.

The SGG crew at IAAPA Expo 2026 – Joey, Dan, Marius, Ben, Ryan and Arve

A note on being in the room

There is a version of this article I could have written from Oslo, based on press releases and exhibitor lists. I couldn’t have written this version.

Being at IAAPA – in conversations with operators, competitors, and partners over three days – is part of how TSGG stays close to the market. The Play List exists to share what we’re learning. This is some of it.

If you’re an operator thinking about competitive socialising and where it fits in your venue, that’s exactly the conversation we have with partners before anything gets built. The Play List is where we write about what we’re seeing. Subscribe below if you’re not already reading it.

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