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A panel at Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals’ recent CYBER HITEC conference offered a potential revenue source for an industry eager for recovery solutions.
Meetings and events are a valuable source of income to hotels. According to Bob Gilbert, more than 1.5 billion people participated in meetings and events last year worldwide, supporting 26 million jobs and generating $1.5 trillion in GDP. Since the pandemic hit, the vast majority of events have been cancelled or postponed, but that doesn’t mean that nothing has been going on behind the scenes.
“Salespeople have been busier than ever,” Gilbert said. “The changes that salespeople have had to go through to move meetings around has been significant. There are some glimmers of hope, but this has been a crazy time.”
MGM Resort's Stephanie Glanzer said that cities have been affected by the gathering limitations put in place by the state. “In a city like Las Vegas, our group business carries us through the week,” she said. “It’s a huge impact. Salespeople and customers have had to collaborate and find solutions.”
Loether said that it’s going to be interesting to watch the industry work through the logistics of hosting hybrid events. He cited a PCMA study showing that when organizations included a virtual element in their meeting, the next year’s event was more well attended because virtual attendees missed the connection of being there in person. But what’s happening now is on a different scale. “We’ve never tried to bring in half of the audience virtually before,” Loether said. “This is a huge leap in scale, so we’re going to be learning a lot.”
This group of experts go onto to discuss “The Cure for Empty Ballrooms: Exploring the Virtual and Hybrid Event Models.”
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