Event Planning Industry Trends

Anticipating event planning industry trends for planners and attendees’ future needs is a lot like trying to select the winning numbers in a lottery. However, there are several key indicators for event planning industry trends that may provide a glimpse at what the future of meeting venues might look like.

Immediate Gratification

Event planners and event attendees both want instant access to information. At several events like Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit, attendees are already turning to an AI-powered chatbot to ask questions like, “When do the shuttle buses operate?”

Other AI-powered technologies are already redefining event check-in experiences and likely to trickle into meeting venues soon too. No more reading instructions on-screen, waiting to check in with a staffer, or finding a QR code to scan. Attendees and planners alike will appreciate meeting venues that support facial-recognition technology for visual check-ins.

Emphasis on Experiential

Experiential has been a buzzword and event planning industry trends as of late, with planners putting more emphasis on making events and meetings interactive and as engaging as possible.

And that emphasis for experiential often begins well before a meeting or event even starts. Planners looking to visualize how a particular venue might look are using virtual reality (VR) walkthroughs and 3D floorplans, like Allseated Vision, to add an experiential layer to site selection and event planning.

To keep attendees engaged, entertained and interested, venues need to support planners in their desire to create opportunities for attendees to participate and engage – like the flexibility to create more collaborative room layouts that foster creativity, themed food and beverage offerings, or offering other physical spaces and activities that promote team building.

Values-Based Behaviors

Increasingly, whether it’s for personal or professional organizations, event planning industry trends are showing that buyers and attendees want businesses to integrate social impact activities in their business models.

Cone Communications, a public relations and marketing agency specializing in corporate responsibility, has found:

• • 63% of Americans are hopeful businesses will take the lead to drive social and environmental change
  • 87% will purchase a product because a company advocated for an issue they care about
  • 78% want companies to address important social justice issues

Meeting venues that make the decision to embrace values-based behaviors like corporate-social responsibility activities that give back, actively adopt waste and carbon footprint reduction initiatives or subscribe to supporting local suppliers with farm to table cuisine will satisfy both planners and attendees’ needs to do good.

Connected Living

The vast interconnections via the Internet allows everyday objects to send and receive data which keeps our world increasingly connected. Assimilating, analyzing and harnessing data points across all these connected devices provides valuable insights to improve decision-making and increase efficiency.

For meeting venues, IoT technologies like RFID badges and venue beacons can be used to track and provide insights into attendance behavior and traffic flow patterns. These insights can be extremely beneficial for providing detailed information to help planners gauge event success while also providing them with feedback to aid in future planning.

Venues can also benefit by embracing event technologies that enable connections between attendees – whether that’s networking, matchmaking or peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

Forward-thinking venues recognize that both planners and attendees’ needs and wants are rapidly changing. Meeting venues that embrace event planning industry trends and ideas that are trending now will find they are well positioned to take advantage of whatever the future may bring.