HSMAI Affordable Meetings Successful in '04
Staff -- Tradeshow Week, 11/8/2004
Attendance at the three HSMAI's Affordable Meetings this year was up 23 percent over 2003. And although other indicators seem to say the hospitality industry's fortunes are improving, Hospitality Sales & Marketing Assn. Intl. President and CEO Robert A. Gilbert said it might be a stretch to draw too many parallels between that and the success of the HSMAI meetings.
"There's not always a direct connection between sales and marketing and the economy," Gilbert said, even though HSMAI surveys indicate meeting planners expect to plan more meetings in 2005 and 2006 than they did in 2004.
That is because most people who attend HSMAI's Affordable Meetings don't actually consider themselves meeting planners.
"Our niche has been the administrative assistant who also has to plan 20 or 30 meetings a year," he said.
Part-time planners made up the bulk of attendees at the Mid-America meeting last April at the Navy Pier in Chicago (1,171 attendees); the West meeting in Long Beach, Calif., in June (620); and the Natl. Meeting at the Washington (D.C.) Convention Center in September (1,628).
The number of exhibitors for all three shows was up 30 percent, from a total of 850 in 2003 to 1,113 in 2004.
