Despite the worldwide economic downturn, the global meetings and events industry will benefit from renewed creativity and innovation in 2009, according to American Express and Meeting Professionals International (MPI), which released last week preliminary results from their annual
FutureWatch study. A forward-looking glance at meetings industry trends for the next 12 months,
FutureWatch 2009 acknowledges business challenges and realities, but asserts a promising rebound for resourceful planners.
"After three strong years, the global meeting and event industry is coming to grips with a major paradigm shift and the
FutureWatch data reveals how acute the expectations are for change," MPI President and CEO Bruce MacMillan said in a statement. "Our objective is not only to ensure our members survive the shift, but also to find ways to thrive as the industry retrenches in an ebbing economic cycle."
According to this year's preliminary
FutureWatch findings, meeting attendance per meeting will decline by 5 percent in the United States, but will actually increase by 3 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and by 9 percent in Canada.
Still, meeting and event budgets worldwide are expected to fall by 6 percent in 2009, forcing meeting planners and suppliers to develop new standards and practices that MPI and American Express suggest will make the meetings industry more efficient and more effective in the long term.
Among those new practices is likely to be technology, as 11 percent of meeting professionals surveyed as part of
FutureWatch expect an increase this year in the use of technology to access meetings and content remotely.
Nonetheless,
FutureWatch asserts, face-to-face meetings are still considered to have high ROI, which 74 percent of organizations holding meetings and events say they measure.
The complete
FutureWatch survey results will be released next month at MPI's MeetDifferent conference, taking place Feb. 7-10 in Atlanta. For more information, visit
www.mpiweb.org.