Watches and Wonders Geneva: Which Days Are Actually Open

About Watches and Wonders

Watches and Wonders Geneva is the annual watchmaking fair held at Palexpo, with over sixty houses exhibiting. It is the successor to the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, the SIHH, which dates back to 1991 and was for three decades the closed trade event of the industry. The rebrand came in 2019 and the first fair under the new name was held in 2022.

The change of name was a change of policy. The SIHH was for the trade and the press and nobody else. Watches and Wonders keeps that core — the professional days are still the fair — but from 2023 it opened several days to the public in person for the first time. The 2025 edition drew 55,000 visitors, including nearly 1,600 journalists, which gives a fair sense of the balance between the two halves of the week.

Who Runs It, and Why That Matters

The fair is organised by the Watches and Wonders Geneva Foundation, established in September 2022 as a non-profit at the initiative of Rolex, Richemont and Patek Philippe. Its board is chaired by Cyrille Vigneron of Cartier with Claude Peny of Patek Philippe as vice-chair, and in 2024 Chanel, Hermès and LVMH joined it. The chief executive, Matthieu Humair, runs a team of around thirty people.

Trade Days and Public Days

The week splits cleanly. The professional days are for retailers, collectors known to the houses and the press, and this is when the year’s releases are actually shown, explained and allocated. The public days come afterwards, are ticketed and are a very good exhibition of things that have already been placed.

The distinction matters more here than at almost any comparable event. A new reference from a house with constrained production is effectively spoken for during the trade days. Walking the same stands on a public day is worth doing, and it is not the same activity. If the purpose of the trip is acquisition rather than education, the trade days are the trip.

Where to Start

• Establish which half of the week you need — the trade days are where allocation happens, the public days are an exhibition
• Accreditation comes through the houses — it is granted rather than purchased, and it starts with the relationships you already have
• Build the appointments outside Palexpo — the independents and the auction houses are in Geneva that week and see people by arrangement
• Book Geneva early — a small city absorbing an entire industry for a week fills months ahead

The Fair Is Not Only in Palexpo

Geneva during that week behaves the way Basel does in June and Maastricht does in March: the official programme is the smaller half of it. The independent watchmakers, the auction houses and the dealers all hold their own appointments across the city, and a serious collector’s week is built from those appointments rather than from the hall.

The fair has also travelled. The foundation has taken the flagship event to Shanghai several times, hosted at the West Bund Art Center and ran a three-month immersive exhibition in Hainan from 2 December 2022 to 28 February 2023. Those editions are genuinely public in a way the Geneva trade days are not, which is worth knowing if the aim is to see rather than to buy.

How We Help

• Accreditation for the professional days where the relationship supports it, and tickets for the public days where it does not
• Appointments with houses and independent watchmakers against a specific brief
• Introductions on the auction side, and the valuation and shipping that follow an acquisition
• A hotel in a city that is fully committed for the week, and tables through it via our Fine Dining & Nightlife service
• Private aviation into Geneva and transfers across a congested week — ask your Business Concierge

A word on honesty, because this is an event where it is easy to overpromise. Nobody can buy their way onto the trade floor of a fair owned by its own exhibitors. What can be arranged is accreditation where a collecting relationship already justifies it, appointments with the houses and independents who are in the city anyway and a week in Geneva that is organised rather than improvised. Where a client has no standing with a particular house, we say so and work on the part we can actually move.

Switzerland in spring is also worth more than one stop. Geneva sits on the same lake as Montreux, and the mountains that hold the Verbier Festival in summer are two hours away by road. A fair week extended into a Swiss week is a better trip than a return flight around a single hall.