News

Group Business Meeting

US hotel group Hyatt said bookings for group business meeting and conference have beaten pre-pandemic levels for the first time since the crisis began, reporting “remarkable pent up demand” as corporate offices start to fill up again. Mark Hoplamazian, chief executive, told the Financial Times in February 2022 that despite cancellations because of the spread of Omicron, bookings for group meetings in January had been 14 per cent above the same point in 2019. “There is prominent and very clear evidence that group [travel] is on the precipice of some significant surge in activity,” he said. “We booked and realised more business in the fourth quarter of 2021 than we did in the fourth quarter of 2019.” Corporate group bookings were among the earliest parts of the travel industry to be hit by the pandemic — with major conferences and events quickly cancelled when Covid began to spread at the start of 2020 — and have been slow to recover from border closures and travel restrictions.

UK Conference & Meeting Industry

This is line with much of the UK conference and meetings industry, see HERE. For example Etc Venues have reported a 20% week on week increase in enquiries for the 3 weeks leading up to the 10^th of February. The Venue Directory in early February reported that “Our enquiry levels are the same as they were in the early part of March 2020 and only 20% short of what there were at this time in 2019”. While here at Cavendish Venues enquiry volumes in the first week of February 2022 matched those in 2019”.