“I've never wavered in my belief in the power of getting people together.”

Hamish Reid is an associate director at marketing agency MMGY Hills Balfour and has more than 20 years of business events experience. He was the youngest ever recipient of the M&IT Personality of the Year Award in 2009.

I remember the exact date everything changed: March 10, 2020. I was doing sales calls in Geneva. The MCI offices had introduced some Covid protocols already and events like ITB had been cancelled. But I think we all still thought this was short term.

I bumped into a friend of mine at the airport, a BA captain, and he’d driven from northern Italy to get a flight out. If a pilot can’t get a flight, you start to think who can? That was the time I respected this was going to have a real impact, this was going to have closures, this was not just going to be a couple of weeks. The next day IMEX Frankfurt was cancelled and the speed of the negative impact on the industry became apparent.

As a company we reacted quickly. We were in a good position because we work with clients based all across the globe and many of us were very used to working with Zoom and Teams and had been doing hybrid sales calls for some time. Some of the future work though was gruelling, because presenting through a screen is a very different interaction than in front of people and it's very difficult to have that engagement and read the room. 

I’m old enough and lucky enough that I was at Live Aid. You tell people that and they are interested. You tell them you watched it on the TV at home and probably not so much! Live has the power and it was just a question of when it would return.

We actually managed to do a fam trip to Dubai in December 2020. There was that short period of time where everything was green and it’s the quickest fam trip I’ve ever recruited for. As my remit covers Europe we also did one in June 2021 and balancing the various restrictions in France, Germany and Italy was interesting!

We reverted back to doing face to face client events in the UK on May 17, literally the day we could. As a team we have had to be a little bit creative, and do things a little bit differently, but we've been active in doing in-person sales events since.

Because of the length of this pandemic, businesses will value the face to face engagement of their staff and with their customers more so than they did before. For many years we've spoken about ROI in events, and the justification of events. I think now that companies recognise there is always going to be a grey area, but that grey area is actually a positive one.

Elements of events which were a little bit difficult to justify are now seen as a good thing. Things such as getting your staff to talk to each other, or engaging in a different environment outside the office. I think for our industry, if we don't try to over egg it, there's a way of actually galvanising that so people continue to realise the strength of face to face. 

There’s an interesting conversation with sustainability with regards to business travel. Rather than an individual flying to wherever and back to do two days of business meetings, there might be more pressure on them to go to that city for those two days’ business, then also go to a trade show elsewhere, so to be away less often but for longer periods. That could be beneficial to our industry as it'll give trade shows and conventions more of a raison d'etre.

There could be a shift in the balance of recognising event travel versus business travel. I think accessible hub cities will benefit hugely. I think we will see more delegates going to trade shows, as if you’re meeting 40 customers at that trade show, that will justify the travel.

The individual business traveller can choose to fly economy, because that gets them to the same place, and it will have less detriment to the planet. But that change is going to upset certain routes and certain yield models for airlines so we shall see some changes there.

Those destinations that have proven the value of business events to their governments seem to have opened up their events sector a lot quicker. Because those governments value business events. Unfortunately that still seems to be a challenge in this country. The government still doesn't recognise the value of what business events generate.