Trade Shows Tiptoe Back to Life With Attendance Still Down 40%

(Bloomberg) -- Despite some awkward moments — elbow bumps, and reluctant handshakes — the U.S. industry convention is slowing coming back.

That’s not a moment too soon for a sector whose survival was far from certain a couple of years ago and that is vital to the full recovery of two key industries: hotels and airlines.

Nationwide, about 11.5 million professionals attended business-to-business trade shows in the U.S. last year, a 55% jump over 2020, according to the Dallas-based Center for Exhibition Industry Research. That sounds impressive, but it’s still down two-thirds from the more than 35 million who went to conventions in 2019. The lack of international visitors remains a major drag. 

Things were looking a little better by the end of last year, with attendance down only 43% in the fourth quarter compared with 2019. 

That trade shows get their mojo back this year is “very critical, and in 2023 it’s even more critical,” said Chris Brown of the National Association of Broadcasters, which is staging its annual blow-out at the Las Vegas Convention Center next week for the first time since 2019. 

In the pre-pandemic world, the NAB gathering would typically draw more than 90,000 people and generate 70% of the trade group’s annual revenue, Brown said. The annual show went online for the last couple of years, and those events brought in perhaps 20% of the in-person versions, Brown said.

Some companies spend in the six figures on their convention exhibits, and “you cannot deliver that kind of value in the online world,” he said.

More than half of the country’s industry associations let go of workers because of losses from canceled events, according to the American Society of Association Executives.

Growth Engines?

Convention centers, and the local governments that typically build and finance them, are just as eager for the pandemic to disappear into history. 

While only a few bonds linked to convention centers have run into trouble so far, the venues may not be the growth engines that local politicians had envisaged. After attendance collapsed in the Great Recession, it didn’t fully rebound to 2007 levels until 2014, CEIR data show. 

The current funk in the convention industry isn’t driven by a financial crisis as it was back then, so companies should be quicker to return to shows, said Allen Shaw, an economist with CEIR. 

Among the biggest venues, attendance at the Las Vegas Convention Center was down 41% in January and February this year, compared with the same period in 2019. At Chicago’s McCormick Place, attendance at shows in the second half of last year was down about 35%.

Earlier this week, professionals involved in addiction treatment converged on Atlanta’s biggest convention venue, the Georgia World Congress Center, for the Rx and Illicit Drug Summit. The organizer, events company HMP Global, scored a rare win in the trade-show business by drawing about the same numbers as it did before the pandemic — about 3,000 people — partly because some attendees earn continuing education credits. 

Roughly one in five attendees appeared to be wearing a mask inside the venue’s main corridors, although more were masked up inside the more intimate session rooms. 

Kirsten Carlson of Pear Therapeutics, a Boston company that makes software products for addiction treatment, queasily stretched out her hand for a handshake and asked, “Are we doing this?”  

Overall, though, Carlson sounded glad that such events were on again.

“I thought virtual would take over,” she said. “But honestly, nothing really beats in-person.”

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