“The sector is seeing very strong trading at the moment, it’s going well everywhere. The only fly in the ointment is that budgets were sometimes a bit silly so the comparisons are a little hard.
“When we look back on this year, especially with a UK perspective, we’ll see a good, solid performance. We’ve been through the cost of living crisis, an election, inflation, all of those factors made 2024 quite volatile. Positive but volatile. So 2022 and 2023 was gangbusters and 2024 was more steady as you go, with some wobbles in there from external factors.
“Looking to 2025, fingers crossed the economy will be doing pretty well, but even if not it’ll be stable. We’re already seeing an improvement in intent, with bookings going up, if not yet attendance but there's always a slight lag.
“If we look at, for example, June to July last year, the bookings went down quite significantly, but there was a 10% increase on the year in June 2024 and then a 13% increase in July.
“There's a general feeling that this is growing nicely, this is going OK. Then there is the anecdotal evidence from hotels that beds are softening, which is causing them to turn their attention to meetings and events, which is something that hasn’t happened before. As an M&E benchmarker, there hasn’t been much demand for data on the sector before from hotels, it has always been beds.
“But now the management in hotels are turning their attention to M&E, because it’s an area of growth, at a time when they are very much in the market for growth. They want to know how much more they can do with M&E and see evidence of what to do. Do they employ more staff? Do they do more capex? What do they invest in to get the returns."
We are experiencing a lot of businesses using VP's benchmarking for investment analysis, not just sales performance.
“It’s really encouraging for the M&E sector. It’s not moving into the mainstream, beds will always be the main concern, but it’s a serious topic of conversation and is now at the top table.”
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