Inside Aakar 2026: Why India’s Biggest Tent & Event Show Is Turning Into a Global Sourcing Floor

Every August, Greater Noida turns into the unlikely epicentre of the world’s tent and event-infrastructure business. This year was no different — except the scale was. The 12th edition of **Aakar 2026** ran 19–22 August at the India Expo Mart, and if you work anywhere near the MICE, wedding, or live-events ecosystem, this was the four days you couldn’t afford to skip.

Our team was on the ground, and what struck us wasn’t just the size of it — 1,200+ exhibitors and over a lakh trade visitors passing through under one roof — but who showed up. Aakar has quietly stopped being a domestic tent-and-decor bazaar and started looking like a genuine international sourcing event, with manufacturers flying in from China specifically to plant a flag in the Indian market.

## The Show, in Brief

Aakar 2026 wasn’t one exhibition — it was four, bundled together and run by Team Aakar, an organiser with 25+ years and 50+ trade shows behind them:

– **HORECA Asia 2026** — hospitality equipment, kitchen tech, F&B

– **Tent Decor Asia** — tents, canopies, outdoor furniture, event infrastructure

– **Hospitality Asia** — hotel supplies, amenities, furniture

– **SFX & Light Expo** — audio, lighting, and stage technology

Shilpa Shetty came on as brand ambassador this year, which tells you where the organisers see this show heading — from a trade-only affair to something with genuine mainstream visibility. But the real story, for us, was on the floor: the structural tent manufacturers, most of them Chinese, quietly building out what looks like a serious play for Indian market share.

We sat down with two of them.

## Shelter Structures: The Quiet Market Leader Betting on India’s Premium Events

Walk past enough booths at a tent expo and the renders start to blur together. Shelter Structures’ booth didn’t. The company — headquartered and manufacturing entirely out of Guangzhou — has been in this business for 24 years and, by their own account, sits among the top three players globally. A quick cross-check backs the claims up: Shelter has been the clear-span tent supplier for the Beijing Olympics, has supplied structures for the WTA Wuhan, and counts PGA, F1, and the Olympic Games among its client list — alongside newer forays into military and UN-grade aircraft hangars.

What makes them interesting from an India lens is the exporting history: no manufacturing base here, but 12+ years of exporting into the Indian market, and eight consecutive years showing up at this exact exhibition. That’s not opportunistic booth-hopping — that’s a company treating India as a long game.

On the product side, their range goes well beyond the standard A-frame and dome structures you’d expect:

– **Polygon, Dome, Flat Roof, and a newly launched “Atrium” design** — all developed in-house

– A 40+ engineer R&D team, with every custom structure put through static engineering checks before it ships

– The distinction of being the **first Chinese manufacturer to engineer a triple-decker (three-storey) structure**

– Their **”Arcum” system**, exported in bulk to the US market

– **Tension Fabric Structures (TFS)** engineered specifically as aircraft hangars — a genuinely unusual crossover from event tenting into aviation infrastructure

– Deployment for tennis and padel court enclosures, and multi-storey structures with custom walling for tourism-board events

For Indian planners working on destination weddings, F1-adjacent hospitality, or large sporting events, Shelter’s pitch is essentially: *we already build for the top tier globally — the only question is whether you’re ready to source at that tier.*

## Holaj Tent: The Scale Player Chasing India on Price and Speed

A few aisles over, a different pitch. The representative — grey polo, company logo, standing in front of a wall of project photography — leads not with pedigree but with scale: Holaj operates out of a **100,000 sq. m manufacturing facility** in Foshan, Guangdong, one of the larger tent-manufacturing footprints in China. (Foshan is worth noting — it’s positioned as China’s hardware capital, giving Holaj tight access to raw aluminium and PVC supply chains, which matters a lot when you’re quoting large-format jobs on a deadline.)

Their proof points were concrete, not abstract:

– A **60-metre tent built for a Scania press conference** — a scale the rep said very few Chinese manufacturers can technically pull off

– A large-scale structure delivered for the **Russian Olympic Games**

– Confirmed, ready-to-deploy **glamping tent designs** for adventure tourism when we asked directly

But the part worth flagging for anyone in Indian sourcing is the strategy statement: Holaj is explicitly trying to break into the Indian market, and their stated approach is aggressive — **compete on the lowest possible price point while matching the build quality of established German tent manufacturers.** That’s a direct shot at the European players who’ve historically owned the premium end of large-format structures in India (think HTS tentiQ and similar), and it’s the kind of price-quality arbitrage Indian event companies and hospitality groups should be watching closely over the next couple of editions.

## The B2B Travel Angle

Here’s why this matters beyond “big tents were on display.” Aakar has become a case study in what a well-run vertical trade show can do for inbound B2B travel: it’s pulling in serious manufacturing delegations from China specifically to court Indian buyers, on Indian soil, at a show that didn’t exist in this combined form a decade ago. For anyone in our world — corporate travel, MICE, exhibition logistics — that’s a signal. Shows like this are exactly where the next wave of India-inbound trade delegations, factory visits, and sourcing trips get seeded. If Shelter and Holaj are any indication, expect more Chinese structural and event-infrastructure manufacturers to treat Aakar as a standing fixture rather than a one-off.

For Indian event companies and hospitality buyers, the floor effectively gave two live options: **Shelter**, playing the credibility-and-pedigree card with global marquee clients already on the books, and **Holaj**, playing the scale-and-price card to undercut the European incumbents. Worth watching which strategy wins more business at Aakar 2027.