Simpleview, which provides CRM, CMS, and digital marketing for destinations, has shared group sales performance data for 215 DMOs throughout the U.S. and Canada. According to Simpleview the findings, segmented by region and gross exhibit space, demonstrated an ‘encouraging’ bump in the number of leads. Between January – June of 2022, DMOs received almost as many leads as in the first six months of 2019. Compared to 2021, leads were up nearly 3% quarter-over-quarter. Simpleview’s data included bookings, which were shown to have outpaced 2021 but had not yet reached 2019’s levels. From January to June 2022, the number of bookings jumped by 77% compared to 2021, but only averaged 70% of the 2019 index. In the most recent Knowland’s U.S. Meetings Recovery Forecast, released in July, improvement was also seen in U.S. meetings. Knowland, an industry intelligence data company, bases its forecasts on its own historical data from the top 25 group markets in the U.S. Kristi White, chief product officer at Knowland, said: “Even with ongoing concerns about the economy and COVID variants, the industry is rebounding in an unprecedented way.” “In Q1, U.S. meetings and events volume was flat with the forecast while Q2 overperformed by 25.8% more meetings and events. Corporate events are leading the charge in this recovery with several markets already recovered at more than 90% of 2019 levels in this segment.” According to the forecast update: “Meeting levels will recover to 106.3% of 2019 levels in 2023 and 115.7% in 2024.”
Report highlights
Further highlights from the report include:
- 2022 bookings still lag 2019 bookings by 30%.
- Leads are within 6% of 2019 in the first half of 2022.
- June 2022 had 3% more leads than June 2019.
- There are 2,300-plus more hotel leads for July to December 2022 arrivals than for the same period in 2019.
- Sports is the most successful market, according to the data, and has more leads in 2022 than 2019 had for both hotel meetings and convention centre events combined.
