Proactive Planning in Uncertain Times

It’s really hard to provide advice for navigating changes that could significantly impact your next meeting’s performance. Trade shows and gatherings with a significant deal-making benefit could end up just fine. It’s the scientific, academic, and research meetings and those with a large international attendance that potentially face the strongest headwinds.

We’re all seeking answers to big questions: Will international attendees feel welcome and safe? Will inflation cause corporations to scale back their professional development, travel, and marketing budgets? What impact will tariffs have on meeting costs and supply chains? What cuts will be made for the Oct. 1 Fiscal Year 2026 budget? For example, proposed budget reductions for the Department of Health and Human Services are 26 percent or $33 billion — which includes funding to research institutions like Harvard.

Proactively plan during these uncertain times, by considering these five strategies:

1. Registration pace tracking

Most organizations use weekly pace reports for tracking registration and housing. A better early performance indicator will be monitoring the registration pace by primary attendee segment. Develop individual goals and pace reporting for international, academic, government, and industry attendee segments. If you have a global audience, track the top 10 countries traditionally representing 70-80 percent of international participation.

2. Just-in-time content

Most conferences havetheir program content finalized 16–20 weeks out. Consider holding back 20 percent of your slots for emerging, just-in-time learning. These sessions should be curated in the final 12 weeks and dripped out in email marketing with “this just added” messaging. Your agile and relevant programming will ensure this is a can’t-miss event.

3. Contingency planning

Think about how to:

• Accommodate speakers who cannot make it in person to present live via a virtual platform.
• Capture and schedule post-conference replays of your top sessions.
• Identify sessions and presenters who could fill in for last-minute speaker cancellations.
• Deliver a hybrid conference.

4. Reducing attendee risk

During times of uncertainty, fewer attendees will register during your early-bird timeframe. To mitigate their risk, offer early birds softer cancellation policies — if not a full refund, then options like applying all or part of the registration fee to a future event or virtual experience or donating to your foundation.

5. Fine-tune your newsfeed

Some tweaks our team is making include:

• Reaching out to get insights from meeting organizers whose event is coming up soon or recently concluded. Many won’t share details in online forums or listservs.
• Adding U.S. Travel and Tourism Economics to our newsfeed. These are the two best sources for getting the pulse on international inbound travel trends.
• Making it a point to consume news from both far-right and far-left media outlets. While the truth is often somewhere in the middle, perceptions will drive behavior.

Force Majeure?

If your meeting performance is impacted by government regulation or another situation beyond your control, will your organization be liable? That’s the million-dollar question that will be debated by our industry in the coming months. A few things to consider:

1. Some force-majeure clauses include stipulations for partial performance vs. entire cancellation. You want both.
2. Make adjustments in good faith. If you think your meeting is going to be impacted negatively, take early action to reduce room blocks and space for potential resale. This could help your negotiating stance.
3. Use today’s uncertainty for hotel negotiations. The seller’s market will be shifting and contractual provisions are going to soften.

Adapted from Dave’s Forward Thinking column in PCMA’s Convene. Reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. ©2025.