Smart Meetings

When meeting planner Tracy Stuckrath got diagnosed with food allergies 19 years ago, she had an epiphany—on a plate. “As a planner, I realized that I could not eat at my own events,” she says.

Florida tourism continues to rise beyond pre-pandemic levels, raising booking competition and requiring creativity and caution from planners.

The decrease in daily face-to-face interactions could result in increased demand for team and company gatherings that previously happened informally or in the conference room. The way Adobe Chief People Officer and Executive Vice President of Employee Experience Gloria Chen explained the company’s plans in a 2021 blog post, “We’ll gather for the moments that matter. We will have an intentional mix of physical and virtual presences with in-person gatherings driven by purpose and designed for collaboration.”

IACC Americas Connect will build on Meetings of the Future research and model the three pillars addressed in the group’s signature report—people, community and environment.

In 2022, billions worth of development has and will continue to shape the city. Opening later this year is a 133-acre Apple campus, which will feature a 192-room hotel; and the 5,000-seat Moody Center concert venue at the University of Texas just opened in April, solidifying the city’s reputation as the “live music capital of the world.” Consider this your site inspection of the cool kid on the Texas meeting map.

In every era, flowers remain a timeless feature of event decor that refuses to fall out of style. It’s hard to deny the draw of freshly cut flowers. Lawn Love recently published the study, “2022’s Best Cities for Local Flowers,” which compared 200 U.S. cities in flower access, delivery access, vendor quality and local demand.

The questions before us: In a world of rapid and increasingly cataclysmic climate change, could the return of F2F events and our drive for their continual growth contain the seeds of the industry’s decline? And most importantly, how might it be possible to avoid this potential fate?