“Right now I won't sign a contract without a Covid clause.”

Rita Andrews is the head of exhibitions and procurement at Applied Market Information (AMI), based in Bristol.

I’ve never been so busy doing nothing. We haven’t run any live events since March 2020. I do all the procurement; my year was spent negotiating contracts with venues and hotels.

We’re planning to start running events again in mid-September. We’ve got 17 conferences between then and the end of the year. They’re mainly in Germany, three or four in Spain and a couple in the US. Then we’ve got two expos, one in Germany and one in the US in November.

We turned a lot of the conferences last year into virtual, but we’ve seen the interest drop significantly now. When we started we reached a much wider audience. People that would not travel for a two day conference, but they would sign up for something online. Now they’re tired of attending these events.

It’s tricky to organise virtual events. We’ve done events where we’ve had people in the office from 6am in the morning to 11pm at night so we could get the times right for different regions.

I’ve already got 2022 booked. We used to run 72 conferences and now we’re at around 50. We had to shrink our workforce, times were lean. We’re finding they’ve moved on, and although we are recruiting the talent is reduced in terms of the number of people able to do the job. Also, less and less people are keen to leave their homes and go back to the office.

My 2022 is basically absorbing contracts that I didn’t use last year. We use a huge variety of venues, right at the beginning there were lots of cancellation charges to be applied and as time went on the terms became more and more flexible, because we were all in the same boat. They couldn’t host anything either. You could see some of the smaller, private properties holding onto that revenue – for survival, I guess – while the bigger brands were more flexible.

Right now I won’t sign a contract without a Covid clause or similar. I’m looking for more flexible terms, smaller commitment in terms of minimum requirements – and I’ll know who was flexible when I needed it. And some of the others who stung me with cancellations charges, I’ll know not to go back to them. Who wouldn’t remember that?

Event insurance is a tricky one. Especially on trade shows. Our exhibitors are also asking for more flexible terms. I’m asking suppliers, but then exhibitors are also asking me for a Covid clause or a full reimbursement. It’s impossible to get Covid insurance, our premiums have gone up for sure.

The passing on of flexibility of terms is interesting. There was a competing event in our industry that cancelled in the US this year and it didn’t refund any deposits from the exhibitors. We’re talking huge deposits, $150,000, then we came in and said we’re still running ours! And everyone said, yes, but we need a clause that if you cancel we have refunds. Everybody was stung by the big event. I’m curious to see if people go back, it’s such a big show.

For 2023 I want to have a look and see where my events are best placed. I only took over procurement in January 2020. The plan was in 2022 I was going to look at all the events and see where their natural home is. Some of them should be in Ireland but they’re in Germany, that sort of thing. Now my 2022 is absorbing all the contracts and we’re staying put. Some countries, Ireland is one of them, have put really good incentives to bring back live events, so of course we’re going to have a look at that.

We can flip our events to virtual, that’s what we’ve been saying to people that have booked. Some are better received than others, some are super technical and people are there for the content. However, some are more about the networking, and that doesn’t happen so much in the virtual event.

Hybrid is not on my agenda. It is expensive, you have to run two platforms, it’s duplicating the work. It’s very time consuming to set up the virtual aspect. We’ve had a good look at it and we don’t think it would give us enough revenue to justify it.

Vaccine passports are a can of worms, it comes across as discrimination. We will do what the country and the city ask us to do, that’s where we’ll stop. It makes me really uncomfortable going beyond what’s legally required.

In terms of the audience the Americans are go, they’re there. They’re doing the parties, networking, sitting together. The Asians still can’t leave their cities, that has completely stopped.  We do about five conferences in Thailand, nothing is happening there. And in Europe it’s a mixed bag, we’ve got people chomping at the bit to go out and others are too scared to go on a bus.

The return to live events is really tricky. We’re preparing for September with lots of uncertainty around all the protocols, and all the testing you have to do. It’s like the year of the wetwipe! It’s really uncertain, we want to go back to what we were. Will we? Will people feel comfortable doing the same things again? I don’t know.