AIA Great European Carnival - Paris and London comes to Hong Kong

The AIA Great European Carnival is back, promising to be bigger, more fun and better organised.

Last year’s edition was a good lesson for the two-month-long event – which returned after an eight-year hiatus on the Central Harbourfront – when many of the 25 rides were still getting government approval and licences after it already opened.

As a result, recalls carnival founder and chief executive Michael Denmark, the fair “kept morphing”, with new rides being added right up to the last week of its run. That made it hard for the organisers to market the event, and for the public to understand exactly what the carnival was about.

“In hindsight [it was] a fun challenge but at the time, there wasn’t a lot of smiling going on ... apart from the people who were coming to the carnival.”

And many did go. By the time it closed, the funfair received more than 830,000 visitors and became one of the most popular public events last year. Denmark was pleasantly surprised.

“We had to share the message that ‘we are open but we are not quite what we want to be yet because we had rides sitting around’,” he says. “And while we were doing that, we were working with the government to get the rides open. The public, because there hasn’t been a carnival in Hong Kong for [eight] years, came along anyway.