Meetings and Events Spend Expected to Increase, Personalized Experiences and AI to Drive Growth in 2025

 

The meetings and events industry is projected to flourish in 2025, with meeting professionals citing planned increases in meeting budgets and an overall confidence in the future of the industry. These insights were captured and released in the 14th annual Global Meetings and Events Forecast from AMEX GBT Meetings & Events. 

Despite challenges like rising costs and ongoing staffing shortages, the 2025 forecast points to solid growth ahead for the industry, surveying over 500 meetings and events professionals from around the world to get their insight into the future of the industry.

The main insights from the 2025 report include: 

• 74% of meeting professionals surveyed said they are optimistic about the industry’s overall health.
• 66% of respondents expect their budgets to increase in 2025.
• Location availability is the number one challenge for planning a meeting in 2025, with high costs, budget cuts and hotel staffing levels among other top concerns for planners.
• Internal meetings will continue to be the most frequent meeting type in 2025, a continuation from the trends seen in 2024.
• Over half of meeting professionals consider sustainability to be a highly important in their 2025 planning.
• A significant majority (86%) of meeting professionals have already implemented DEI best practices or plan to do so in 2025.

The report also looked at which technologies meeting professionals plan to use, with AI unsurprisingly topping the list at 50%. However, this data also points to another growing trend highlighted in the report, the fact that attendees want more personalized experiences and companies want meetings to become more strategic and flexible. 

Companies can utilize AI and other technologies to help personalize content and enhance connections between attendees, while at the same time still recognizing the value of non-technology focused initiatives such as in-person networking opportunities. 

[Related: Internal Meetings, AI to Drive Meetings and Events Industry Growth in 2024]

Another trend highlighted in the report is more focus on creating memorable experiences for attendees. When asked how they would use an increased budget in the survey, the top priority meeting professionals gave was “improving the onsite experience.” 

“End to end experience is more and more important,” said Emma Bason, director of global venue sourcing for AMEX GBT Meetings & Events. “When we looked for venues in the past, we looked at location, price, and value. Now we are asking, ‘how does this venue make you feel?’”

The top considerations that meeting professionals identified for creating memorable attendee experiences include the meeting content, venue and destination. 

“We’re going to see a big focus on emotional engagement,” said Milton Rivera, global vice president of the Experience Studio at Amex GBT Meetings & Events. “How can you engage audiences in your product and brand? It’s not easy, because the audience today is diverse, and the demographics are complex. In the past maybe you could ignore or skip over this. Now there’s no getting around it.”

Check out the full 2025 Meetings and Events Forecast report for more insights and data.