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Nearly 200 Davos attendees who had registered and paid for hotel badges were left stranded in the cold on Monday. They waited in line for hours only to find out a dust-up between two event organizers led to a mixup of who should be granted access to a tech and finance event called EmTech Invest.
Davos, of course, is governed by a caste system of colored badges that not only unlock access but also dictate, to some extent, how important you are. It’s the capitalist hierarchy made flesh — a multi-colored map of who actually matters. So to pay for a hotel badge — and not get it — left scores of people livid.
“It’s really frustrating to not be able to get in for the things I came all the way here to do,” one of the people, who had stood in line for days, told Semafor.
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EmTech Invest bills itself as the “premier gathering where trailblazing innovators and visionaries in technology and finance converge to shape the future,” and had organized a series of events inside the Grandhotel Belvédère. Alena Yudina, the event’s founder, told Semafor she arranged with the events company Introducing Leaders to process badge registrations, but found out on Monday that more than half of the 300 people who registered did not actually receive badges, including Yudina herself.
Introducing Leaders then asked to charge more to process the remaining badges, which Yudina declined to pay, according to text messages seen by Semafor. Introducing Leaders founder Molly McAdams denied that anything untoward had happened, and that the fault lay with Yudina for inviting more attendees than the 60-person event room could accommodate.
It wasn’t just EmTech. There’s a hot market for off-label or fake badges, with street prices reaching above 1,000 Swiss francs ($1,200). USA House, the unofficial base for the US delegation that’s sanctioned by the State Department by privately funded by corporate sponsors, issued a warning that “fake VIP passes may be the fastest selling fiction about Davos since Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.”
As of Monday evening, Yudina and her staff were still without badges, but the event will continue without them, she said: “The show must go on.”