SANITY vs VANITY
Peter Heath , founder of Venue Performance , says the sanity of booking versus the vanity of enquiries is a balancing act for venues , as conference bookings pick up
s we all now know , because we have all watched countless Government briefings on Covid 19 , collecting data is one thing , and analysing it is another . Drawing meaningful conclusions that turn into correct actions , however , is yet another matter entirely .
What do we know about the state of the meetings and events industry right now ? Well , at the time of writing , we have precisely one week ’ s data after prime minister Boris Johnson announced his roadmap on 22 February .
Exploring , analysing and drawing conclusions from single snapshots of data is difficult and I ’ m certainly not going to fall into the same trap that the Government did and ( start ) making decisions and recommendations based on a single week ’ s worth of data .
Having said that , we do have the data so we might as well take a quick look at it and see if there ’ s anything in there .
Firstly , and probably no great surprise , there isn ’ t a great deal of uptick in the number of events being booked in February . We can see that some events are being booked and it just goes to show the optimism and desire to hold events again . Of note , there was a Christmas party booked for over £ 25,000 : bold , but somewhat rare .
There is a clear split between private and corporate bookings , with the latter forming the overwhelming majority . Yes , there are strong signs for private events , ceremonies and parties , but the majority are business events . Conference bookings doubled in February compared to January and of those the majority were for 2021 , so that is extremely encouraging . It would seem , on the limited data set available , that 2021 is very much in the sights of a lot of clients . If this ( limited ) data is representative , there are reasons to be optimistic .
Meetings saw a 20 % uplift in February compared to January , but again that ’ s from a very low base and unsurprisingly we expect those to have shorter lead times .
When we watch the March data , a picture will emerge as to the size and lead time . At the moment , meetings are still low in size in terms of delegate numbers , low in cost and with a mix in lead time .
Banqueting is unsurprisingly low on volume . That type of event is probably the
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