Yoshichika Terasawa, Director of Japan Event Association,
Chief Researcher of Event Research Institute
After Covid-19 outbreak,physical events have disappeared in the venues around the world. Business
Event Venues faced the unprecedented challenge not able to host physical events over a year. Meanwhile venues have established the infection preventive measures based on the Covid Safe Guidelines of the national and local governments and positively cooperated with related organizations in order to ensure the business events industry is ready to safely restart. As the number of COVID-19 cases increased, the venues were converted to temporary hospitals and vaccination center in various parts of the world.
However the global situation in the business events industry was greatly affected by the Delta variants, the physical B2B events restarted globally from September to October 2021 under the strict infection preventive measure. It is because that vaccination progressed and infected cases have been controlled gradually. But due to ongoing restrictions on international travel,the events are still domestic market oriented and limited in scale of events. It has been predicted that it will take around 2 years for the business events industry to return to market size of pre-COVID-19.
Even in these circumstances,some facilities have implemented new strategies even before the Covid-19 outbreak and continued to develop the With-Post-Covid-19 strategy through overcoming damages of Covid-19. The point of this strategy is to recover the loses caused by Covid-19 and aiming for further development to meet changing needs of events and to be able to keep up the competition with other cities in the region and country.
The following is an overview of the best practices of the latest trends in the venues. First,look at the latest particular trends in venue concept and strategies that have emerged in USA and Europe. And then introduce individual cases of venue trends.
Business events venues strategies and concepts:
In Asia,especially in China, large-scale venues continue to be built, on the contrary USA and European countries have focused on providing conveniences to users, flexibility to changing needs,environmental and sustainability requirement, contribution to brands of city and region,and digital environments in the investment priority of facilities.
After the Covid-19 outbreak,the venue has shifted its priority to both health and safety of users and visitors and the improvement of the facility quality & functionality as well as operational know-how including the strengthening measures to prevent infectious diseases.
Specific initiatives implemented in the particular facilities are as follows.