This year, Routes was entered into the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) Connect Awards which celebrates and rewards the very best in events and won the 'Networking Event of the Year' award for last year's World Routes forum in Las Vegas, USA.

World Routes is the largest global annual event of its kind. The largest and most prestigious event in the Routes portfolio, the event attracts the most senior representatives from airlines, airports and tourism authorities, who wish to meet, plan and discuss new and existing global air services.

The winning event – the 19th World Route Development Forum took place in Las Vegas, USA and attracted nearly 3,000 high profile delegates from more than 100 countries worldwide.

Co-hosted by the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority and Las Vegas McCarran International Airport, the event was held in the Las Vegas Convention Center and marked the first ever Routes event in the USA.

Paying attendees could pre-schedule meetings in advance to guarantee an efficient use of time and investment and to ensure they were front-in-line to meet the airlines they needed to. The Routes scheduling team dealt with organising face-to-face meetings and handled additional requested meetings on-site.

World Routes 2013 was successful in achieving 7,900 pre-scheduled meetings, and an additional 8,100 organised on-site.

Routes recently celebrated its 20^th World Routes in Chicago at McCormick Place which saw more opportunities for delegates to meet at World Routes, with 'city pair meetings' - which enabled two airports to identify new opportunities, share ideas and exchange data.

World Routes 2015 will take place in Durban, hosted by the Province of KwaZulu-Natal and will be the first time the event has ever taken place in Africa.

Durban is fast becoming the most important gateway for Africa, and World Routes 2015 will allow delegates opportunities to discuss business and witness the many attractions of Durban and the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal.

Katie Bland, Director at Routes said: “The Routes team is thrilled to have won Best Networking Event of the Year for World Routes at the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) Connect Awards in London last night. This, combined with positive feedback from our customers via our 2014 Customer Insight Programme is very encouraging and reassures us that we’re doing our best to serve the international air route development community through meeting and networking opportunities."

"We’re looking forward to 2015, when we will introduce more improvements to further enhance the networking at Routes to even better serve our customers’ needs,” she added.