The Maritz Trends Report is a value-add for the company’s clients released eight times per year and intended to help those clients and internal account teams better design events and communicate the challenges they’re facing to leadership.

While the rest of the reports are exclusive to clients, once a year, a report open to all is released to coincide with IMEX America. I was able to learn more about the latest report onsite at IMEX America with two Maritz experts: Sarah Kiefer, vice president of brand, and Claire Lester, design studio strategist.

The new report indicates event costs are still going up but the increases are slowing down. Are we entering a period of stability? 

SARAH KIEFER: I hope so. What we’ve been seeing is, yes, hotel inflation overall will be 2% to 4% next year. It’s looking like it’s stabilizing to a little more normal rate. But what we are also seeing is that hotels have slowed down that growth rate. They’re starting to see some occupancy challenges and their rates are holding pretty steady in the luxury, upper-upscale markets. They’re starting to see some erosion in their rates in some of the other, more budget-focused properties. Where we’re seeing the increase in costs for next year, and really this year as well, is F&B and AV. While the hotels have stabilized, those are the costs that are starting to increase at a faster clip at this point.

Event registration is down. Where is it heading, in your estimation?

SARAH KIEFER: Registrations are down just a little bit. We’ve seen probably two thirds of our association trade show events with a decrease in attendance, but that’s been relatively minor, 10% or less. Where we’ve seen the biggest impact is with international attendees, and with our exhibitors we’re seeing just a little bit of a decrease as well. Nothing too concerning. But I would caveat that we’re going into the fall, our big season. What we’ve looked at is the first seven or eight months of the year, where there was a lot of uncertainty and we just didn’t know.

The new report emphasizes the importance of fostering community. What are you hearing about the importance of community-building from partners and clients?

CLAIRE LESTER: One of the conversations we were having a year ago, and even before, was that people were really worried about this younger generation coming in and how technologically dependent they are. There was concern about that impact on face-to-face events. But what we’re seeing is the opposite. The latest data and what we hear from our attendees is that events are actually this catalyst to bring people together, to create this sense of belonging, where there’s a gap in that right now because of technology. We’re having more conversations with our clients about not only developing opportunities for co-creation onsite where people can learn and build relationships, but also opportunities for what we consider spontaneous networking—where something isn’t planned, but there are opportunities to collide with other people.

Tell us a little more about the concept of “spontaneous networking.”

CLAIRE LESTER: We also use the term serendipitous networking. It’s this idea of understanding the people that come to your event and how they like to connect and providing space that is structured but not controlled. I'll be honest, that can be terrifying for event planners because it is relinquishing control when you put in these purposeful gaps in your agenda. It can feel really scary, but what we’ve seen (and tested at our own events) is that those are the moments when people really find a lot of value. It’s the people that they’re meeting between the sessions, the conversations that they’re having outside meeting rooms that are adding value to that event. It really goes into something that we believe passionately in the design studio, which is, you have to know your audience, you have to research, you have to use the data. You have to look at their behaviors in order to create the right environments for those moments to happen.

What happens in the Maritz Design Studio and why is the work important for meeting planners?

CLAIRE LESTER: We look at current trends to see where things are going. Our goal is to help bring in different knowledge and elements from different industries to help provide a different lens to think about designing event experiences. We’re having a lot of conversations with clients right now about aligning vision. We’ve seen a lot of leadership turnover with some of the companies we work with, and they’re asking us to help them re-envision the purpose of their event—why are they doing it, what are they trying to achieve and what are the right elements to measure to make sure that they’re getting there? Another big driver: the compounding pressure there is on event planners to be experts in every area. It used to be they were just focused on planning, and now they’ve got to be experts in maybe insurance or in different costing. We’re really focused on breaking down human behavior and building tools that help provide them a structure for designing new experiences, brainstorming.

Understanding the planner/attendee disconnect

Following his related session at IMEX America, I spoke with Ken Holsinger, senior vice president of research and insights for Freeman, about the new report “Unpacking XLNC: Bringing the X Factor to Attendee Experiences” and how Freeman is getting a better understanding of how attendees and planners ensure event success and how the gap can be bridged. He said debuting the new report at IMEX America was very intentional.

“A year ago, I was here at IMEX America in front of an audience of 500 or 600 people, and underneath all the chairs were flags—green, yellow and red—for polling, really low tech,” he said. “So, I said to the audience, ‘If you believe that you should make changes to your event to reach the next generation and innovate, raise your green flag. If you’re not sure, yellow flag. Disagree, red flag.’ There was a sea of green flags, like two yellow flags, maybe one red flag. OK, so if they agree then why aren’t they doing it? I then said, ‘Do you feel empowered to make those changes at your event?’ Sea of red flags.”

Holsinger said it was at that point that the Freeman team knew the task for IMEX America 2025: empowering planners.

“So, we set out on research we call ‘unpacking excellence,’” he said. “The reason people come to events is to learn, network, have fun and do business. And the idea was, let’s launch that research here because IMEX America is such an experiential event.”

A particularly notable finding from the report was that while attendee respondents said their event experience is tied to their core objectives for being at the show (learning, networking, commerce), planner respondents said attendee event experience is tied to the wow factor—the extra keynote, gala, award ceremony, immersive experience, etc.

“That’s a disconnect—core table stakes values of why I come to an event versus all the wow,” Holsinger said. “We love to talk about the wow in our industry, and it’s not that it doesn’t have a place. But meet the table stakes first. What the attendee wants from their experience is basic. We can apply the wow factor to it. But we quantified that even further by asking, ‘Did you experience a memorable or peak moment at your most recent event?’ Forty percent of attendees said yes. On behalf of attendees, the organizers said they thought 80% of their attendees would say ‘yes.’ Big disconnect.”

When asked to describe the peak moment, attendees said it was a session they caught, a person they met, a vendor they connected with or a product they discovered.

“Again, core objective, they keep coming back to it,” Holsinger says. “What did the planners think the key moment for attendees was? A celebrity keynote speaker, amazing fireworks at the end of the show, a beautiful meal. So, we have a disconnect, but it’s a fundamental thing we can reconnect. The planners know how to do the core things, but I think they’ve been distracted by going beyond and trying to get the next thing. We need to understand attendee objectives up front, map those for them and with them during the event and track everything—and then come back afterwards and ask, ‘Did we accomplish that?’ And we’re not doing most of those things. I think it’s a very practical way to move forward. And then we can sprinkle the X factor on top of it.”