The Business of Events, which is supported by the BVEP of whom EVCOM are a member, is committed to helping create a successful, sustainable, open and inclusive events sector. Developing up to date and real time knowledge on the current thinking and sentiment of audiences across the global business events community, is crucial in developing a considered and effective sales, marketing and communications strategy.
This is why they invest in regular research and market insights across a range of global audiences, and make them available to you, for free, to help you shape your own thinking. They also share these with their partners across Government, to help develop our competitive advantage and show the value that business events can bring to the UK.
Methodology
For this highlight report, they used desk-based research and engagement across their extensive social media channels, to survey three key business audiences from the buyer community.
- Corporate event planners
- Association planners
- Agency planners
These audiences were surveyed over a two week period towards the end of May and early June 2022 and across the three key geographical territories of the United Kingdom, Western Europe and North America. They were specifically interested in those areas which they considered to be important when selecting a destination or major venue in a post pandemic environment. The research focussed on twelve specific areas, ranging from accessibility and ease of travel, through to venue quality and suitability and respondents were asked to rank each on a simple scale of 1 – 10, with 1 being regarded as not very important and 10 as very important.
Key Findings
As you might expect, given the assumption that planners from each region would have differing priorities, the key findings contrasted slightly according to each region. For example;
- While sustainability continues to grow its importance in terms of a decision-making factor in destination selection in the UK and Europe, ranking 8, it does not have the same significance amongst the North American Audience
- Cost and value for money remain very important across all buyer markets
- Destination brand and destination support are also growing in importance, although skills and talent are surprisingly not
- Venue quality and quality of welcome both rank very highly, especially to the US audience
- Accessibility and ease of travel remain very high in importance for all markets
- US planners regard safety & security the highest importance of all three regions ranking it 10, which is significant, given the work being done around the forthcoming Protect Duty legislation
Take a look at the full report here: 2022 Global Report on International Planner Sentiment Final
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash