A decade after the beginning of the Great Recession, the meetings industry is settling into a new normal, our global survey shows planners in many regions are planning more meetings, for more attendees and of longer duration, it is a story of a mature industry with expectations for incremental growth for meeting numbers, duration, and attendees – consistent across meeting types and regions.

Planners are being asked to deliver ever-more-engaging events within budgets that aren’t increasing as quickly as expectations for execution, meaning new strategies must be crafted to optimize design while managing expenses. It is a time of great opportunity for the global meetings industry.

Milton Rivera, Vice President, Global Business Development and Strategy, American Express Meetings & Events observes, “With activity and investment growing, planners will need to rise to meet two key challenges. The first is to quantify the value they are providing to the organization. This doesn’t necessarily mean measuring ROI, but they will need to demonstrate they are delivering against the objectives of the meetings they are managing. Second, they need to make sure they are engaging an increasingly diverse set of attendees in their meetings and content. Meetings are dynamic, as are audiences. These are not easy challenges.”

Meeting Prevalence

Note: We made some updates to our survey this year, including a simplification of the meeting types into fewer (broader) categories.

Among the myriad of meetings held daily around the globe, the most common are internal team meetings, including employee training. In Europe, Asia Pacific, and Central and South America, these account for about a quarter of all meetings. In North America, where they are the most prevalent, they account for 30%.

With activity already high for these meetings, planners across regions have different outlooks for what to expect in 2019. Those in North America expect continued modest increases in the number of internal meetings next year, and planners in Europe expect slight increases. Respondents in Central and South America see the number of internal meetings remaining flat, while those in Asia Pacific anticipate a modest decrease in the number of these meetings.

Meeting Attendees

Expanding Audiences
It is not just the number of meetings that is expected to grow in 2019. Meeting planners across the globe expect small, but meaningful, increases in the number of attendees at their events. The biggest increases are those expected by planners in Central and South America, where customer advisory board attendance and incentive attendance are expected to increase by more than 2% and the smallest anticipated increase is a 0.9% rise in attendance for internal meetings. Planners in North America and Europe expect attendance increases across all meetings, while those in Asia Pacific expect only internal meetings to remain flat.

A Global Perspective
To create this forecast of the 2019 global meetings industry we surveyed over 700 meetings and events professionals around the world and conducted interviews with 30 industry experts who shared their own perspectives for 2019. Respondents represent corporations and associations, buyers and suppliers, across the global network of the people who do the work of the industry. The results are based on input from organizations of all sizes, across five continents and thirty-three countries. The result is a statistically and globally representative picture of the 2019 meetings and events industry

Read the full report here