Global Meetings Industry Day

Personal relationships are at the core of every business decision and face-to-face meetings provide professionals with that personal interaction, which leads to deeper relationships.

• When people meet face-to-face, relationships are developed in a way that technology cannot recreate or match. The ability to look a new business opportunity in the eye and close the deal with a handshake cannot be replicated.

• Face-to-face meetings more effectively capture the attention of participants, inspire positive emotional climates and drive collaboration by building meaningful business relationships.

• Meetings create a shared sense of missions and purpose, foster empathy across organizational lines and create camaraderie that positions an organization for success.

Meetings and events deliver profits, help win new accounts, serve as education platforms and allow colleagues and partners to come together to innovate and achieve results.

• Organizations depend on face-to-face meetings to win new customers, close new deals and develop high-performing talent. The business outcome of a face-to-face meeting far exceeds any other.

Business travelers say they are nearly twice as likely to convert prospects into customers with a face-to-face meeting than without one.

Four in five executives say they have attended an in-person meeting, conference or event that would not have yielded the same success as one conducted via video or telephone conference.

• The ability to sit down one-on-one with colleagues and leaders across industries provides for better learning, instant collaboration and real-time productivity.

• Conventions and conferences serve as critical education platforms for professionals and are key components for developing advanced skills and workforce training.

• Travel incentives and motivational events are business tools proven to increase sales and profits, boost productivity, retain customers, maintain top talent, increase company loyalty, promote teamwork and decrease turnover. When properly designed, planned and executed, incentive travel programs can be self-liquidating and will produce a measurable and verifiable return on investment.

Outside of the results driven by business meetings, the events and meetings industry creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, generates billions of dollars of revenue and supports communities across the country.

• The services provided by the meetings and travel industry often go unnoticed, but the economic impact is unmistakable.

• Research by Tourism Economics, an Oxford Economics company, shows that face-toface meetings and business events not only play a critical role in connecting people and driving business results, but also in supporting 5.9 million jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue.

In 2016, 1.9 million meetings were held in the United States, generating $845 billion in economic impact (or business sales). This contributed $446 billion in GDP and $104 billion of federal, state and local taxes.

Meetings supported more direct jobs than many large manufacturing sectors, including machinery, food, auto, and chemicals. It sustained more jobs than the telecommunications and oil and gas extraction industries as well.

Every dollar spent on face-to-face meetings and business events generated an additional $1.60 for the U.S. economy – an increase of 160%.

• Meetings and events help drive travel and tourism into communities and are often the lifeblood of visitor spending in many destinations.

Hosting an event, convention or trade show stimulates a region’s economy by bringing in a new visitors, who stay in area hotels, eat in local restaurants, shop in neighborhood stores and bring new revenue to the destination.