Istanbul Expo Center

Istanbul Expo Center, known locally as İstanbul Fuar Merkezi or IFM, occupies the fairgrounds of World Trade Center Istanbul in Yeşilköy, in the Bakırköy district on the European side, immediately beside the former Atatürk Airport and a few kilometres from the Marmara coast. It is the exhibition arm of a larger trade complex and one of the two principal fairgrounds serving Istanbul, which is its significance: the venue reports an average of about 100 national and international fairs a year, and it is where sectors such as ceramics and bathroom fittings, HVAC, packaging and composites run their main Turkish editions. The site contains 11 exhibition halls with roughly 98,000 sq m of rentable hall space inside a 249,000 sq m WTC Istanbul campus, together with a business centre of three 17-storey plazas and an 18,000 sq m shopping centre and food court, the four-star WOW Airport hotel with 1,250 beds, the five-star WOW Istanbul hotel and the WOW Convention Center, which handles up to 4,000 people. Growth is under way: IFM has begun a two-storey, 40,000 sq m hall addition that its operator says will lift exhibition space from about 100,000 to 140,000 sq m, an investment the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce has billed as Europe's largest additional exhibition investment. Architecturally the complex is a functional, flat-roofed hall cluster arranged off service yards, with the office plazas supplying the vertical accent. Transport is the differentiator: the M1A Yenikapı–Atatürk Airport metro line stops at DTM–İstanbul Fuar Merkezi station at the gate, Basın Ekspres and the coastal road serve drivers, and the airport hotels make multi-day shows practical.