The meetings and events industry continues to signal that it’s moving full steam ahead toward full recovery. Knowland, a provider of data-as-a-service insights on meetings and events for hospitality, says its U.S. monthly meetings and events data from September 2022 revealed 135.4% growth over September 2021. Additionally, September 2022 grew by 23.7% over August 2022.

According to Kristi White, a chief product officer at Knowland, “Even with the holiday, September took a significant step forward reaching 89.5% recovered to 2019 levels. This is the highest level of recovery we have seen and each month we get closer to full recovery. As we step into the fourth quarter, meetings and events are poised to have a dramatic rebound that will bring the quarter close to full recovery.”

These positive trends are also bolstered by other promising data. For example, Knowland’s meetings and events report disclosed:

  • The average number of attendees per event for September 2022 was 118, compared to 112 in September 2021 and 97 in September 2019.
  • The average space used in September 2022 was 3,101 square feet. Meetings in September 2021 averaged 2,791 square feet and 2,729 square feet in 2019.
  • Proportionally from a per-person perspective, 2022 meeting space used an average of 26 square feet per person as opposed to 25 square feet per person in 2021 and 28 square feet per person in 2019.
  • The corporate segment represents 53.1% of the meetings and events business, with healthcare, technology, and financial/banking taking the lead as the largest industry segments.
  • From a recovery standpoint compared to September 2019 levels, online retail, sports entertainment, agriculture, arts and performing arts, and automotive were the segments at the highest level of recovery captured in September 2022.

The insights presented are a result of the analysis of meetings and events data acquired through Knowland data collection and aggregation methods, including field reporting, and automated methods of customer and non-customer data collection in primary, secondary and tertiary markets, as well as its large historical database.