ABSTRACT
Unsurprisingly, many people both within and outside the conference industry frequently ask whether the industry is still growing, and whether in the years ahead it will experience growth or decline. Investors, for example, need answers to such questions to inform their investment decisions; students need to know if the conventions industry can offer long-term career opportunities; politicians demand to know whether the sector justifies their interest and support; those of us working in the industry wish to understand how we are faring compared with other sectors, and what the projections are for the medium to long term. There is, however, no simple answer to this very big question.
Many factors impact the current health and future development of the sector: trends in national and global economies; environmental issues and concerns; technological developments and the opportunities to ‘meet’ electronically or virtually; threats from terrorism and epidemics such as ‘SARS’; sociological factors and priorities; and many more. Some of these have been explored in earlier chapters of this book; some are examined in more depth later in this chapter. The very dynamism of the industry means that change is a constant feature, and it becomes increasingly difficult to measure one characteristic against another because the characteristics themselves change substantially within a relatively short timeframe. Despite these caveats, there is, in the author’s view, some evi-
dence to suggest that the industry may have reached a plateau. Within the international association congress and conventions sector (see Chapter 2), for example, the number of international meetings monitored by both ICCA and the UIA has ceased to show the rapid growth of the 1980s and 1990s. Whereas the UIA reported on 4864 international meetings in 1983, a number which
