Biggest Threats to the Meetings Industry

I’m very focused right now on the corporate meeting/conference/event space because cutbacks in travel are forcing companies to rethink how they transfer knowledge—and the movement from in-person to “virtual,” or more likely a hybrid in-person/virtual approach is inevitable (as discussed in earlier posts). And that is bringing my company many new inquiries from existing customer and prospects.

That interest has prompeted me to subscribe to meeting industry publications like Meetings to see what the folks in that business are thinking. The February 2009 issue had a very interesting lead story, “2009 Meetings Market Trends Survey.” One of the questions that was asked was: “What do you think is the biggest threat to the meetings industry?” The top responses were predictable: the economy (62%) and airline issues (18%). But, curiously, one of the possible threat answers was “virtual meetings,” and it only received a 5% response from corporate responders to the survey.

The data are not explained, so it made me wonder whether meetings professionals simply do not think they will be impacted by the inevitable movement to virtual (online) or they recognize the trend but are not threatened by it because they actually see it as a useful tool. Unfortunately, I suspect the former—that they don’t see the relationship of “the economy” and “airline issues” to the fact that meetings of the future are going to have to include an online component due to the reduction in corporate travel.

The other thing I thought was curious about including “virtual meetings” as a response option was that the author of the survey actually thinks in those terms—that virtual/online is a threat vs. seeing it as a valuable and complementary tool. I understand that the folks who actually run the conference centers, hotels, and related services will be negatively impacted by the loss of in-person attendance, but meeting planners should be focused how to provide the most robust experience for both online and in-person attendees. That will include live and on-demand delivery of the conference content combined with a lively integration of social networking capabilities. And even conference center managers should be thinking about how they can get into the online game by offering those capabilities to supplement in-person events held at their facilities.