12_______________________________________________________
Trends_______________________________________________________
The aims of this chapter are:
- 1 To examine the factors which drive change in the conference business.
- 2 To consider the effects these factors may have on the development of the conference business in the future.
12.1 Introduction
The conference business has undergone, and continues to undergo, rapid change. The expansion of conferencing as an activity appears to have gone hand-in-hand with the structural changes in the UK and Irish economies, from manufacturing to service based; in consequence, the UK has one of the most well-developed conference industries in Europe and Ireland’s conference industry is developing rapidly. There is no general perception that conferencing is an industry, however, as it is largely subsumed into the hospitality and tourism industries. This perception is changing nevertheless, partly due to a general expansion in demand and partly due to the increasing maturity of professional and other industry bodies. Many factors will impinge on the future development of the industry, from changes in social attitudes to technological development and changes in the economic and business environment.
12.2 Social change
Conference buyers and delegates are just as much part of a changing society as any other client group; consequently, it is necessary to look at some of the issues of wider social change, as these impinge on the attitudes, the outlook and the decision-making process of organizers and delegates. Awareness of social change and its effect should inform the judgement of venue managers about the services, styles, standards and provision needed within conference centres in the future (Hirst, 1996).
The cosmopolitan delegate
Conference delegates (and organizers) are becoming more cosmopolitan in their outlook. In the past when people only took holidays in the UK or in Ireland (e.g. at seaside resorts) they tended to be less comfortable attending conferences outside the country. Today, and in the future, organizers and delegates are well travelled, and younger people, in particular, do not view a European conference destination, for example, as being ‘foreign’. The increasing influence of travel is crucial to this; previously, a client might only have considered a location within the UK or Ireland; in future, mainland Europe and particularly destinations such as Paris and Brussels will offer increasing competition.
Changing delegate profiles
The nature of the workforce, particularly in the service sector of the economy, which generates significant demand for the conference business, has increasingly moved from a male-dominated profile to a balance of delegates, both male and female. This impacts on the nature of services that conference venues must provide, including more secure parking, the provision of créche facilities, the menu composition of the catering, through to the ambience of conference rooms themselves. These things are often not sufficiently explored by venues, which are relatively poor at piloting activities such as refurbishment and new menus to take account of their changing delegate profile.
Delegates’ time is short
The UK has the highest average number of working hours per week of any country in the EU (Drake, 1994). Delegates themselves are short of time (as conferences are often compressed into short periods), above and beyond the simple limitations of how much time a conference organizer might allow for conference sessions. This means that delegates are often virtually ‘captive’ within conference centres and the provision of services must take this into account. Business support, such as copying and faxing, must be responsive and on the spot - ‘some time this afternoon’ is not good enough. Ancillary activities such as the coffee shop or the in-house store must be capable of speedy service and of providing the right goods - most conference centres are still incapable of supplying delegates with a pint of milk to take home or anything at all after 5.00 p.m. If delegates are genuinely short of time, basic amenities of this kind and opening times when delegates break or finish are a vital and a necessary part of the quality of service delegates will expect.
The knock-on effects of delegates being harried for time has implications for core aspects of the service too - rooms must be ready on time, must be serviced promptly when sessions break and elements such as registration must be, above all, fast. Queuing for 30 minutes to register is unacceptable, as it implies that the delegate must arrive earlier, impinging on his/her private time. Similarly, it may, at the opposite end of the day, be more time effective for a delegate to take an evening meal on the premises rather than go hunting for a restaurant or a bar in the town - provided the ambience and standards of the in-house facilities are up to the job. The art is to add value to the basic activity of the conference - even if this adding of value is a matter of providing services which help reduce delegates’ time in travelling or time acquiring additional goods or services.
The informed organizer
The conference business has expanded rapidly during the past 20 years. Whereas in the past, a person might only attend a conference very occasionally, the awareness and education of conference organizers and delegates has increased significantly - organizers are more experienced and professional, delegates have been to many conferences and have higher expectations (Swarbrooke, 1995). The effect has been to create a more aware, better informed client base. This, coupled with a high level of competition, can result in a very low level of loyalty towards a venue and high levels of transferability, i.e. conferences ceasing to be regular at a given venue because the standards do not match the competition; organizers ‘head for the exit’ -go somewhere else. This creates a need, not only for more consistent and higher standards, but for better relations between venue managers, organizers and delegates. Crucial to this relationship is the ability of the venue and floor management to be seen and talked to during conferences, at session breaks and at the start and end of events. Without this, interaction and feedback are poor and a simple problem which could have been remedied by the venue manager on the spot (had he/she been there) may result in the loss of the whole conference (Lovelock, 1994).
12.3 Design and technology issues
Contemporary design issues in conference centre development are varied, but fall into the following categories.
Access
Current wisdom is that buildings should be designed to cope with the least able potential users, not the most. In essence, if a doorway is designed to cope with (for example) wheelchair access, it will be just as useful for fully mobile visitors and delegates, but the same is clearly not true vice versa. In this way, by addressing access issues from the point of view of least able users, all can be accommodated.
Health and safety
Increasing attention has been given to health and safety issues and their related design requirements, the rule of ‘reasonable achievability’ being applied, which has been learned from risk analysis of disasters. The key question is the extent to which health and safety design factors have a cost-benefit in reducing potential problems and at what point the laws of diminishing return begin to apply, or even at what point over-emphasis on safety both negates original use and becomes counter productive. (An example is the over-signing of roads, or exit routes around a building, there being anecdotal evidence that the excessive use of road signs, in particular, is a distraction to drivers, this negating the very safety issues they are intended to guard.) Internal signing and design may fall into the same category - do signs for escape routes genuinely stand out from the plethora of other signs giving information, adverts, general furniture and the crush of people? This should lead to a move for the simplification of signing, perhaps by the increased use of icons, capable of delivering the same message to delegates with varying language backgrounds, but still maintaining the emphasis on safety without confusion.
Fire
The nature of conference centre design is of large open areas, in terms of large-scale and often raked rooms, together with extensive circulation areas (especially atria) which require specialist fire prevention and protection systems. The historic approach to building fire prevention has been compartmentalization and containment, but modern conference hall design may not directly achieve this. The issue of design in response to the threat of fire does, therefore, require the full attention of architects and operators. Recent legislation for this field is covered in the European Framework and Workplace Directives, enacted in the UK in the Fire Precautions (Workplace) Regulations 1997 and similar legislation in Ireland.
Security
The single most forgotten factor of security for conference and convention centres is that, almost without exception, these are public buildings. As such the public cannot and, as a generality, should not be excluded from the chief circulation areas such as the foyers. The difficulty is to achieve the necessary openness. After all, some visitors will be potential buyers who wish to gain an impression of a centre while retaining their anonymity.
The need for security sometimes leads to over-intrusiveness. It is essential that delegates do not feel their privacy is intruded upon. While equipment such as video cameras may be present in public areas, it must not, for reasons of confidentiality, be present in meeting rooms themselves. It must also be understood that surveillance is not of itself the genuine provider of security, merely an element of a whole, which may include security personnel, specialist equipment (e.g. metal detectors) even, design issues such as good lighting, ease of exit (though clearly not necessarily of entry) and design tranquillity of the building itself.
Design pilot schemes
As a generality, wherever possible, new aspects of design such as the colour scheme of a breakout room, new air conditioning or other technical equipment etc., should be piloted first. If a full refurbishment or re-equipping programme is envisaged, venues should try it for a suitable period in one room first or see it in operation elsewhere. It is far too common that delegates arrive for their conference to find that the chairs are uncomfortable, tables wobble, lights flicker, air conditioning is noisy, room decor is claustrophobic and by a fluke of the building conduits you can hear the chef blow his nose half a kilometre away, in the middle of the President’s address. Piloting should enable at least some of these problems to be prevented: involve the delegates.
Impact of video and desktop conferencing
Some debate has taken place about the impact of technology such as video- and desktop-conferencing on the conference business as a whole - will, on the one hand, improving technology render conferences unnecessary? If you can desktop-conference to business colleagues anywhere in the world, will you still need to travel to see them? Or would such techniques actually stimulate demand for greater conferencing? In all probability, these arguments take too narrow a view of the nature of the conferencing business. We noted, when introducing the history of the conference business, that while the exchange of ideas is a core function of conferences and meetings, it is not the sole function. There is a significant social element. Conferences are really only a formalized version of social interaction. In so far as delegates to conferences are present not only for the exchange of information, but also for social activities like networking, then the technology of video- and desktop-conferencing cannot hope to take over the wider role, merely act as subsidiary or complementary to it. Without a doubt, conference venues should also provide video and desktop conferencing facilities, as these can be seen as a vital business support function, but technological facilities cannot achieve the social role of a conference itself, from informal chats with competitors in the corridors between session breaks, to a drink in the bar afterwards to reflect on the issues. It is necessary to be realistic about what technology can achieve; it is often the case that proponents of technology have an over-optimistic view of the extent of its impact and an insufficient consideration of the social implications.
12.4 Change in the business environment
Just as much as social change is rapid in the modern world, so too is change in the business environment. In some respects the two are closely interlinked. Changes in the business environment may be driven by a range of factors, including economic, legal or market issues which are sometimes difficult to disentangle, and range from the global to the local.
The competitive environment
Historically, the competitive environment for the conference business has been confined to the various sectors within the domestic economy, with the international market being largely separate, and only a few major venues in the UK and Ireland competing for market share internationally. This pattern is beginning to change globally, and regionally within Europe. Globally, a number of locations have had a strongly developed provision, notably the USA, with Hawaii being a major destination. Increasingly the countries of the Pacific Rim are developing conference provision, although as many of these economies are predominantly manufacturing based, it is not yet a significant competitive issue. Venues in Britain and Ireland are, however, competing much more actively for business in Europe, as are conference venues in Europe looking at UK and Irish markets. This is due to the gradual elimination of barriers to travel around Europe and developments such as the Eurostar network and fast ferries between mainland Europe, the UK and Ireland. Increasingly, the ‘international’ market (in so far as it refers to Europe) will become the domestic one, and it is important to our perception of the market that this is clearly understood.
Investment
In as much as the competitive environment is changing, so too is the investment environment. After a hiatus, in the early 1990s, companies are once again investing heavily in hospitality, tourism and conference businesses. Bearing in mind that the hotel sector is a major provider of conference facilities, it follows that the development of mid-market and de luxe hotels will, more or less naturally, expand the provision of conference facilities. As much is true of the academic sector, which, under increasing financial pressure from government, is seeking additional sources of revenue. The major universities, in particular, have invested significant amounts in conference centres in order to develop conferences as a revenue stream, although some recent evidence indicates this part of the market may be less fast growing than others (Richards, 1996). In terms of purpose-built centres, the picture is rather different. During the economic boom of the late 1980s a number of flagship purpose-built conference centres were conceived with a high proportion of private sector funding (i.e. debt), in contrast to the more common (previous) method of civic funding from councils or from share issues (i.e. equity). This was, though, rather short lived and since 1990 the investment pattern for such flagship developments has tended to involve a balance of funds from various sources, both debt and equity. In addition, other forms of development funds have been sought from civic, governmental or European fields (Hansen, 1995) including the European Regional Development Fund. Finally, the arrival of the National Lottery in the UK in the mid-1990s, and the provision of Lottery money for a range of projects in many fields including sport, heritage and the arts, resulted in a number of applications for multi-purpose developments, in which conferencing was one component. It is arguable, in the last category, and also as a generality, that the provision of large purpose-built conference centres is now at a mature level, given that the demand for mega-conferences is limited, but that smaller cities and towns may well seek to gain a share of the extensive smaller conference market by multi-purpose provision, or perhaps by the creation of mini-centres providing facilities for conferences of up to 200 people, leisure facilities and basic support such as a coffee shop, limited retail facilities, small business centres and adequate secure parking.
Investment may also be considered to be less parochial than in the past, in the sense that, with the breakdown of national barriers and the increasing number of international organizations, investment funding in facilities in the future is just as much likely to originate from another country as it is from within the UK or Ireland.
My space or yours?
One of the characteristics of the way in which organizations have changed during the past ten years in the private sector, and probably will change in the next ten years in the public sector, has been the delayering of management and downsizing of the organization itself, the net result being a reduction in space requirements. Hand-in-hand with this has gone the ability to put an organization’s space requirements under the microscope, as the costs of running and maintaining property are substantial. While some organizations have created in-house conference centres in order to reduce the cost of organizing conferences elsewhere, be it in hotels, academic centres or wherever, the effort of doing so can only be justified if these centres are cost-effective for the amount of use they get. On the flip side are those organizations that have downsized and also eliminated much of their property, thus requiring conference space elsewhere, and increasing demand. Received wisdom at present (Hirst, 1996) is that demand increases will continue, many organizations having a reduced ability to provide in-house conferences and meetings. Linked to this, from the point of view of conference centre managers, is their own ability to use the space within the venue effectively. The effectiveness of space use is not a matter of finding the ‘right size’ of conference and ‘packing them in’ but more a question of flexibility of use related to satisfying demand, sometimes called ‘chameleon space’ or put more simply, the ability to do a 100-delegate conference one day and 4 x 25 delegate conferences the next, in the same space. It is the optimization of space that matters, relating back to earlier points made about the asset management of venues.
Impact of increased flexibility of working
As organizations have downsized, some have sought to create greater flexibility of working for their workforce with techniques such as hot desking and homeworking to reduce demand on the property (or expensive space) which an organization needs (Gorman and Bown, 1990), though often at a cost of providing higher levels of technology such as workstations, laptop computers, modems, e-mail and Web links. Given the points made earlier about the networking role of conferences, the social interaction aspects of conferences are also significant when considering the needs of organizations which are fragmented. The provision of conferences and meetings is a means of maintaining the social fabric of an organization. In consequence, in those organizations there may well be an increased demand for conferences. This also has implications for conference organizers in terms of how to structure conferences so that interaction opportunities are maximized, which may lead to shorter plenary sessions and a higher level of interactive and informal slots in the programme.
Increasing service sector and professional employment
Both the UK and Irish economies have gradually become more service dominated. As this has occurred, the level of skills and knowledge in large sections of the workforce has had to increase. In a competitive environment it is of considerable importance for organizations and individuals to continue their education, which, put in simple terms, is likely to increase the need for seminars, training meetings and a whole range of other conference and convention activity. Although some of this demand is soaked up by academic institutions in the provision of new courses, the re-skilling of the workforce has seen an increase in demand from seminar and training organizations for conference facilities.
Summary
The pace of change in the conference business has increased in recent years, particularly with the impact of new technology. Nevertheless, we must not forget that conferencing is primarily a social activity, and one which is crucial to the interchange of ideas. As such, the business has a bright future, but needs good management and organizational skills as much as any other industry. It is hoped that this book goes some way to laying the foundation for those skills.
References
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