Celebrating Our Differences
The last time the meetings industry tanked was in 2008. (Remember the AIG Effect?) Suddenly meetings were deemed wasteful — even shameful — and largely unnecessary.
The effort to counter that damaging misperception led to the creation of the Meetings Mean Business coalition. In the dozen years since, MMB has commissioned reams of research and launched sweeping marketing campaigns to raise awareness about the vast value of meetings and events.
The current challenge: In terms of Covid restrictions, business events are treated no differently than leisure and social gatherings. But there are important distinctions, stresses Michael Massari, chief sales officer for Caesars Entertainment and co-chair of MMB. For one, people tend to follow the rules in a business setting, making health-safety protocols highly enforceable and effective.
“You view your participation differently when a meeting is for work,” says Massari. “Maybe you're being paid to be there, your boss is watching, your colleagues and contemporaries are all participating. And it’s quite easy to control these environments, with spacing around lines and around chairs, staggering arrivals and departures, and so on. You just have a lot more control.”
Even more importantly: Business events are absolutely vital to economic recovery. In 2019, alone, 500 million business trips represented $348 billion in spending for travel-related goods and services and supported 2.5 million American jobs, according to the U.S. Travel Association.
It’s particularly frustrating, adds Massari, that leisure restrictions are easing up faster than meeting restrictions in some states. “I was just in Philadelphia to see a couple of friends,” Massari told me in late April. “I was in and out of five or six restaurants and bars, and they were mobbed shoulder to shoulder, bands playing, no masks, and there were as many as 500 people in these places. And yet, you can't gather that many people together in a controlled business environment in Pennsylvania.”
State guidelines are loosening as vaccination rates rise, but we as an industry still need to make our point. And the distinction between leisure and business meetings needs to be permanent, says Massari: “We need to be prepared for whatever scenario we find ourselves in some day in the future.”
Inconsistency and the Deepening Divide
Throughout the pandemic, gathering limits, mask mandates and other measures have varied from state to state — and those regulations were often motivated by state politics. Now, requiring proof of vaccination status has become a political issue that also directly affects meetings and events.
This uneven approach has wreaked havoc on our business. Destination International’s recent CEO Summit, held in Tampa, emphasized this in a session featuring CVB leaders Dana Young of Visit Florida and Caroline Beteta of Visit California. With very minimal restrictions on gatherings, Florida’s group business flourished, while Covid-cautious California is months behind in its recovery. The contrast in their circumstances is stark.
We can’t level the playing field without consistency. Until then, politically charged decisions will continue to influence site selection. In fact, the great majority of meeting planners consider a destination’s health-safety policies an important factor in their decision-making process, according to Northstar’s recent First Look Research, Site-Selection Priorities: 2021 and Beyond.
One set of rules for business meetings and events would simplify logistics and create more opportunities across the country. U.S. Travel is trying to make that happen. “We've been calling consistently for the federal government to put forward standards to help with the interoperability across different areas of the travel environment,” Tori Barnes, vice president of public affairs and policy, told me recently.
New research from MMB — to be released as early as next week — will make a strong case for eliminating the confusion and hindrances that currently hamper our progress, Barnes hinted, and should help prove MMB’s point — once and for all — that meetings really do mean business.
