Will In-person Meetings and Events Resume in Mid-2021?

By Robert McGarvey

Hold the euphoria, pass the reality pills when the talk shifts to exploring when in-person business events will resume in full force.

And always remember: money talks, b.s. walks and in this case money is talking very loudly and not in favor of the resumption of many in-person meetings. Specifics on that towards the bottom of the piece.

First, however, let us marvel at the giddiness that is sweeping the events and meetings world as genuinely good news about two vaccines – Pfizer and Moderna – has been released and now there is a poll of event planners where almost two in three said they envisioned holding in-person meetings and incentives by mid 2021. And do note: that optimism was recorded before the upbeat news about the vaccines came out. I wouldn’t be surprised if now 90% would forecast a mid 2021 return to the good old days of meetings.

That survey asked 447 planners and most said we should be packing our bags and planning to attend a business event by mid year 2021.

I don’t believe it.

I would like to, I just don’t.

There are many reasons for my skepticism.

It starts with a strong belief that we will not have wide distribution of vaccines in the US until late 2021 at the soonest.  

Creating the vaccine is one thing. Distributing it another.  The Pfizer vaccine for instance has to be stored at -70 Celsius which equals -94F. I do not know about you but I have never experienced -94F and my understanding is that many physicians’ offices, pharmacies and similar places where vaccines would be distributed do not off hand have that capability.  Yes, they could jerry-rig a deep freeze using dry ice.  But will they?

The Moderna vaccine needs storage at -20 Celsius which is around the 0 F that a home freezer maintains.  It shouldn’t be a problem for the vaccine supply chain.

It also is very unclear that many states will have the money and the staffing to distribute the vaccines.  Federal funding and support has been expected but, so far, it’s a no show and the outgoing administration seems ever more detached from the business of governing.  Of course the incoming Biden Administration will take action – but two months also will have been lost and that is bad news given the magnitude of the on the ground distribution of vaccines to hundreds of millions of us.

 But then there is the matter of a lot of anti-vaxxer Americans – perhaps one in three – who will decline to get the vaccine. Just 58% said they planned to get vaccinated in a recent Gallup poll. The more who choose to sit this out, the more cases there will be.

So count me as not seeing a mid 2021 resumption of meetings.

Know I am not the only skeptic about meetings not popping up on the calendar anytime soon.

In Phoenix, for instance, the city owned Convention Center – which lives on business meetings – recently announced plans to reassign considerable staff to other city departments and to cut hours of part-timers.  These are painful decisions for this government.

The city said convention business had dropped 73% year on year.

There is no accepted timeline for when business might return to pre pandemic levels at the Convention Center.

New York City, meantime, is not forecasting a return of its tourism business to pre pandemic levels until 2025. A lot of that traffic of course has been business related, including many events and meetings.

This year the city will do about one-third of the tourism business it did pre-pandemic.

And then there is the sound of money talking, big money talking very loudly about travel – namely the nearly $1 billion Amazon has saved in lower travel expenses in the Covid-19 era.  Early in the pandemic Amazon told employees to halt non essential travel and halt they did, said Amazon CFO Brian Oslavsky in the Q3 earnings call.

Oslavsky speculated that internal travel – that is, for inhouse meetings – will probably return but, he said, it may not return to the level it once was.

Bill Gates chimes in with a prediction that post Covid business travel will be a reduced 50% rate.

I think that is spot on.  I envision a return to travel to support sales, possibly in mid 2021, probably by late 2021.

I do not see when inhouse travel will return.  I am not saying it never will. Just that I do not see a date where it looks likely.

And an awful lot of business travel has been intramural. Not just at Amazon but at every big company with multiple locations.

Some of that travel involved enough people for convention center spaces to be put to use.  But maybe not again in the near future.

Meantime, too, even the meeting planners in the poll cited earlier admit that virtual and hybrid meetings very much figure into their planning.  In fact, 72% said that at least some of their planned 2021 events will be virtual or hybrid.  

I’d say that sounds right. Like it or no, when we next meet it is likely to be virtually. For some months to come.