Covid -19 represents an unprecedented challenge to the Exhibition Industry. Not only because of the economic impact, but also for the disruption it brings in terms of behaviour and adoption of new technologies by all stakeholders.
The aim of the second wave of this research is to collect and understand the point of view of industry’s leaders across the world regarding the current situation, expectations for the future, which measures are being implemented to react to these new challenges, and to finally share all these findings with the entire industry in order to provide an effective support in decision making.
Visitors and buyers not being willing (or allowed) to travel and cash flow constraints remain the top 2 issues
75% of exhibition industry professionals consider visitors and buyers not being willing or able to travel to be the most critical issues they had to deal with because of the shift in time of the event.
This goes hand in hand with a very critical cash flow situation, which resulted in painful decisions for all organisers.
Overlapping with calendars of other events and the availability of venues to re-schedule the event is affecting primarily smaller event organisers (those organizing less than 5 events).
Event organisers are not standing still and waiting for the Covid-19 pandemic to be over
There is a strong increase in terms of initiatives implemented by event organisers during this pandemic.
Workshops and webinars hosted online have now been organised by more than 75% of them (it was 65% in July 2020). Virtual events became a reality, with now almost 7 every 10 respondents who presented it already or are about to.
On the adoption of these solutions, the size of the organiser is a key element, with larger companies offering it more than smaller counterparts.
How engaging are exhibition organisers towards their employees?
For the first time we measure how much employees are satisfied about working for an exhibition organiser and how engaged they are with the companies.
Sitting at the bottom of the ranking are the education opportunities offered by the company, particularly when it comes to venues and smaller businesses.
We are still in the middle of the storm
Expectations about the future are not great as yet. These are actually worse than they were in July 2020.