New challenges and opportunities for event planners

The race for space, intense cost control amid rising inflation and rebuilding partner and supplier relationships are some of the biggest trends continuing to impact the events industry.

This is according to a recent webinar, entitled Data Deep Dive: Unveiling Event Trends and Insights, hosted by SITE. It highlighted the latest trends impacting meetings and events, by focusing on event technology platform provider Cvent’s latest event venue sourcing data and a pulse survey carried out among event planners in October. The webinar featured contributions from Kelli Kopec, senior marketing manager at Cvent and Alex Platia, director of product marketing at Cvent.

New strategies

With in-person events almost fully back to pre-pandemic levels, space is at a premium. Kopec said the key is to source early, source often, and think broadly about the types of venues and markets where you want to host your events.

The biggest concern for incentive planners is that supply remains tight while costs continue to creep up. Planners, however, appear not to be cutting back on incentives to offset these costs - instead, group sizes have reduced overall for incentive trips. They also say that getting buy-in for budget increases for incentive travel is harder than ever.

“Costs and budgets are really under pressure - there are fewer requests for proposals with more than 200 attendees and the same is true in terms of room nights,” said Platia.

Some planners are also considering two or more destinations for their next event - Cvent’s data showed that 70% of RFPs (requests for proposals) are sent to a single destination, 10% to two destinations and 16% to three or more destinations. One reason for this, according to Platia, could simply be that planners are shopping around for a venue that meets their budget. In terms of destinations, Europe is proving more attractive than ever, with data showing that cities such as Vienna, Florence, Dublin, Milan and Prague are proving popular.

Platia said it is too early to see what impact the ongoing conflict in the Middle East is likely to have on destination choice, but besides Europe being on the up, he noted that global sourcing volume has bounced back, particularly in Asia.

Life cycle of events

The webinar also examined the duration of the life cycle of an event: the average duration from when an event is created to its actual start date is around 154 days. The size of the event impacts this further, with data showing that the life cycle varies from 20 to 100 days for a smaller event, all the way to 340 days for an event with 500 or more attendees. Booking windows meanwhile generally range from 100 days for the smaller events to 300 days for those larger events.

While hybrid and virtual events are still taking place, the in-person format, unsurprisingly, is the dominant event type.

“We're seeing that 85% of event programmes in the system are leveraging in-person events,” said Kopec. “Virtual events also remain popular with our customers - 45% are using a virtual format, whether that means hosting a fully virtual event or leveraging a virtual component for a hybrid event.”

Industry segment trends

The data also looked at format diversification across industry segments, with Kopec noting that in-person events are still the mainstay of event programmes, across a wide range of industries.

“Healthcare, education, financial services, and government are the most diversified segments when looking across each of the formats (in-house/virtual/hybrid),” she said. “Financial services and manufacturing remain primarily in-person event driven.”

Need for rebuilding relationships

Kopec also highlighted the extent to which the industry is rebuilding partner and supply relationships, owing to high levels of staff turnover.

“We've all seen or felt the effects of staff shortages that happened over the last few years,” she said. “We have new people entering the events industry and relationships either need to be reinforced or rebuilt as things stabilise.”

Platia added that new planners in the industry need everything at their fingertips, especially digital tools in an era when site visits might not be an option or if they simply do not have time to spend hours researching a destination or venue.