The State of Meetings 2023: Destination Trends and Strategies
For Global Meetings Industry Day, an international day of advocacy powered by the U.S. Travel Association, we asked Zartico’s team of Strategic Advisors to illuminate the current state of meetings and conventions for our partners across the country and what trends they see for 2023 and beyond.
Meetings are back — sort of
Looking at the aggregate event data from PredictHQ, meetings surged back in 2022 compared to 2021. While business softened in late summer, the first quarter of 2023 is double digits above the same time period in 2022. However, this is not the experience for all of our destinations.
Because of the long lead-time in planning most conventions, recovery rates are greatly impacted by local factors in play during the past couple of years, such as COVID infection rates, locally mandated restrictions, and the timelines for rescinding those restrictions.
It’s worth noting that we haven’t yet reached the event dates for many of the conventions that were booked after the effects of the COVID pandemic began to play a decreasing role in meeting planners’ decisions. This may be one of the factors explaining why the volume of conventions and expos continues to grow, while attendance and contracted room night numbers are still lagging.
“Our most significant trend is that there is no trend,” explains Katie Cook, director of strategic advisors. “We see some client partners who are in very different phases of their recovery. Much of this seems to be due to factors outside the destination organization’s control, making it difficult for destination leaders to develop fair performance goals for their teams.”
Short-staffed
One of the trends being felt nationwide is a staffing shortage. While the leisure and hospitality industry added 105,000 jobs in the most recent U.S. jobs report, a staggering 1.7 million L&H jobs remain open.
For some destinations, high seasonality and difficult working hours in the leisure and hospitality industry have made other jobs more stable and attractive. Hotels have had to be creative in filling the gaps — even hiring robots for cleaning duties — to maintain a quality guest experience in the face of these staffing shortfalls.
The staffing shortages also extend to the destination organization, where the pandemic forced many to shrink their sales staff. Smaller staff, or new hires with less experience, have made the ramp back toward normal levels of business challenging. And these obstacles are compounded by the hotel shortages — limited sales staff on both sides restricts capacity to host site visits or even respond to RFPs that would bring in additional groups.
Monitoring the room block
Meetings continue to have an economic impact extending well beyond the contracted room block, and a recent Zartico analysis in partnership with Visit Fort Worth confirms that it’s not just the largest groups booking outside the block.
Looking at six convention groups visiting the destination in 2022, our advisors noted that on average, more than one-third of attendees were observed outside of the contracted hotels. Among the medium-sized groups (500-1,000 peak attendees), as many as 60% of attendees stayed outside the block and were observed at up to 20 hotels across the destination.
Keeping an eye on this trend may help destination leaders understand how meeting planners are thinking about their planning — and how conservatively they are approaching room blocks as we continue to pull away from pandemic restrictions.
What we’ve learned: Agility is key to success in 2023
The overarching theme among our Strategic Advisors is that adaptability and agility are key for success this year. Don’t rely on metrics from 2019 to understand how your sales strategies are performing — too much has changed in the industry and in travel patterns. Instead, focus on a yield management strategy from the ground up.
- Reevaluate the booking window on lead business. How has your booking window changed by market segment? You may have more short-term business opportunities than your destination sales team is used to focusing on.
- Layer in your leisure business. For many business-heavy destinations, a shift from business and conventions to leisure has helped them weather the slower business recovery more effectively. Use leisure travel as the foundation for growth.
- Evaluate your true serviceable capacity — it likely isn’t 100% of available hotel capacity. Understanding what a reasonable ceiling is today can help you assess whether or not to focus on business in parts of the year when demand is lighter. This can extend your season and help those part-time positions trend more toward full-time positions that are more attractive to employees.
- Communicate your value to your stakeholders. In many of our analyses, convention attendees generated economic impact well outside the convention district and stayed in accommodations well beyond the hotel block. Loyalty programs, short-term rentals, and changing traveler behavior have created a more dynamic lodging and visitation dynamic. Travelers want to experience the destinations they’re visiting for conventions and are eager to have distinctive and unique experiences. Measuring and communicating these patterns to stakeholders can help to change the perception of the convention sales efforts from “they just benefit my downtown” to “they’re a critical component of my customer mix.”
Want to better understand how the convention traveler experiences your destination? Book a demo of the Zartico Destination Operating System™ today.
