Business Events Recovery: 'We Have a Human Need to Meet'

In February, we published two contrasting views of the recovery of business events. Trends expert Daniel Levine predicted that face-to-face attendance at meetings and events will exceed 2019 levels by the middle of 2022. In a more tempered view, Brass Tacks Events owner Kevin Molesworth, CSEP, said that despite a pent-up desire to meet face-to-face, many business travel budgets have been slashed.

The question of how the recovery of business events will play out inspired responses from readers. Kerry L. Kerr, senior director of global accounts for HelmsBriscoe, shared her own 11 predictions for what needs to change in order for the recovery to happen, including rethinking hotel contracts “and how we plan meetings, from the ground up.” She expects hotel buyout requests will become more commonplace in response to concerns about crowding, she said, and she hopes sales departments will gain back more control than they had in recent years, “when revenue management was calling all the shots.”

Juliano Lissoni, managing director, MCI Group Canada, found the topic “very interesting,” he wrote. “I’ve recently challenged myself to go beyond the noise and the bias of why or why not our business of making people to come together should persist in the future. We should not assume that just because technological tools are evolving, we will only want to gather in a digital format. Trying to understand what the future of the events business will look like requires us to have a deeper understanding of our human needs, particularly those that are biological and anthropological, emotional, and economic.”