Meetings and Events Industry News

Organizations planning small events are finally embracing technology to solve their most annoying problems. It's been a slow process, and better mobile and sourcing tools have made a big impact.

Avoiding digital tools to help manage simple meetings is a big missed opportunity. The good news is that more meeting planners and travel managers plan to experiment with new technology over the next year.

As eventprofs, a "build it and they will come" attitude towards events just won't cut it. Even if you are the best event planner in the world, if people don’t know about your event, they won’t attend. Like any marketing plan, your event advertising needs to start with a strategy. With the ever-competitive event market, it is important to stand out and while this may come at a price, it makes the effort worthwhile.

Eventbrite's rise has happened in tandem with that of the experience economy at large. Both the consumer and enterprise event technology sectors have thrived in recent years, with mobile tools redefining how people research and buy tickets to events.

An arms race is on in the event technology sector as established players look to take on Cvent while embracing emerging technologies. This is good news for meeting planners and other event professionals, bringing an array of choices to a sector that is consolidated at the top.

Aventri may sound kind of like an Italian resort town, but it does stand out among other event technology brands. It's hard to brand a platform that offers a suite of services in a sector defined by individual product offerings. We'll see how this works out, and what companies Aventri acquires in coming years.

When someone says “event design,” a lot of meeting planners still think about table centerpieces and drapery. But event design is actually about how we structure events at every step of the creative process to achieve specific objectives. Download the report to learn more.

It's one thing to make your event as accessible as possible, but the rest of the travel industry needs to do more to adequately present suitable options for every traveler. In a welcome development, online booking is finally placing a new focus on accessibility.

Making money is important for most events, but it isn't everything. Happy attendees and successful business outcomes can help move the needle for companies, even if an event itself isn't a huge moneymaker.

Proving return on investment in the meetings and events space is not for the faint-hearted. It’s a difficult challenge, providing metrics for a host of areas from net revenue to attendee satisfaction. Yet planners are under growing pressure to meet the challenge.