NYTimes: The Event Industry Re-emerges

The event industry is back and better--or at least different--than ever.

So says New York Times business columnist Joe Sharkey, who wrote last week that the event industry is finding its way out of the woods. The future of corporate events, he says, may largely be online.

Here's an excerpt:

In the 2007, the meetings industry represented about 44 percent of the roughly $200 billion in business travel spending, according to the U.S. Travel Association. But the meetings business is now in a deep slump. In the first half of 2009, domestic hotels lost $1 billion in revenue from canceled meetings alone, the travel trade group said. For the first 11 months of 2009, convention attendance in Las Vegas was off 25 percent from the same period in 2008, the convention bureau there said.

Now, as business travel slowly comes back, the meetings part of it is struggling to regain its footing. In the process, it is being redefined. One, events are being planned with a far greater emphasis on cost control. And two, at least for some events, companies are increasingly relying on sophisticated technology to eliminate physical events and instead hold virtual meetings that do not require travel.

Over the past few years, an increasing number of event planners have chosen to take their events online in order to save money and headache.

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Find out more at PremiereSpeakers.com/Web_Events.