American Express Meetings and events recently released its 2020 Global Meetings and Events forecast, which is packed fill of venue finding trends for the next twelve months.
They found that amongst survey respondents there is a belief that the industry will stay steady in 2020 with moderate growth seen across all meeting types, modest increases in spend (which is good news for hotel bookers) and a continued focus on attendee experience and the delivering of experimental events.
Let’s take a closer look at the key global results:
- Overall spend in every region is up – North America (+1.6%), Europe (+2%), Central/South America (+2.6%) and Asia Pacific (1.3%)
- This increase in spending means that there will be more meetings booked across all regions
- These meetings will be longer by up to 2.9%
- More people will be attending these meetings (+3.1%)
- Internal team meetings are expected to account for up to 25% of all meetings which is most likely driven by an increase in firms spending more on their incentive programmes to attract and retain the best talent
Coming a little closer to home, the results for Europe closely reflected the global trends as outlined above – despite some uncertainty about the future caused by the political uncertainty of Brexit. Again, internal team meetings are expected to be the most common type of meetings. In the UK, however, there is more breadth in the type of meetings predicted to be most common, with more conferences and tradeshows being predicted than other regions.
Many hospitality professionals believe that the worst of the economic slowdown seems to be over, but Brexit is still looming large. Many professionals in the UK, for example, were reluctant to predict trends for 2020 due to the high level of uncertainty as to what will happen once the UK exit the European Union.
While the attendee experience is just as important in the UK as it is everywhere else, there are slight issues with this due to privacy issues with GDPR and also Brexit. However, there is predicted to be :
- A 2.5% increase in spending next year
- A 5% increase in spend on improving onsite experience
- A 1.92% increase in the cost per attendee per day for incentives
Complience with GDPR loomed large with:
- 52% of respondents finding the centralised data management standards somewhat or very challenging
- 51% finding the consent standards somewhat or very challenging
- 52% finding the Designated Oversight standards somewhat or very challenging
It is interesting to note, that the research by American Express found the list for the top ten meeting destinations for 2020 was topped by London!
- London, UK
- Berlin, Germany
- Barcelona, Spain
- Paris, France
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Madrid, Spain
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Rome, Italy
- Prague, Czech Republic
- Munich, Germany
If you are looking for a venue and events management London, then please get in touch with the team here at Conferences Group today.
