The worldwide Corona pandemic has fundamentally changed people’s behavior. Affected by this is also the feeling for space and closeness. This in turn affects the MICE industry. Reinhard Peter explains in which manner.
Reinhard Peter, founder and managing director of Repecon (repecon.de), is convinced that people who have spent two years at a distance have come to appreciate the "extra physical distance" in public space that everyone is now afforded. This also has an impact on room design for business events, meetings, conferences and workshops.
The MICE industry in particular must take new requirements into account, especially in terms of room size, room design, seating and new Conference, Meeting & Event formats.
According to Reinhard Peter, conference hotels and venues will have to adapt to the following in the future:
- Meeting and event participants will love spacious room concepts even more than before (large-area, spacious rooms).
- The classic positioning of event participants in pairs at a table that is usually only 140 cm wide will rarely be desired in the future, because this setup or seating will be perceived as too cramped. The trend is towards single seating, which provides sufficient spacing. Peter comments: "This is important for new purchases: Anyone investing in meeting furniture today has to take into account people’s changing sense of space."
- Meeting formats are moving away from purely frontal formats to more interactive meeting & event concepts. 1:1 conversations or working sessions in small groups are increasingly part of the agenda. However, people are not spread across several rooms, but grouped in one room thanks to the more spacious room design (1 large-area room for all).
According to Peter, Hybrid event formats will tend to decline. In the future, events will have to convey experience and emotional values more than ever before. This is only possible to a limited extent with hybrid meeting formats. Peter says: "Event and Conference participants want to get the maximum out of it. What you don’t get via video meetings is: the real life, the authentic, the human." The expert predicts that social interaction will be the main selling point for face-to-face meetings and on-site events in the future.
Photo: Corona has changed the requirements for setting up conference rooms. The trend is toward creative, spacious meeting rooms – preferably with individual seats rather than a "cramped" seating. (©repecon, Reinhard Peter, Photo at Mintrops Landhotel Essen)
Related topics:
Venue booking, location setup, seating concepts, event formats, meetings, conferences, event trends, location planning, venue setup, hospitality industry, MICE industry, event trends
(Please note: This article was translated from the German language. Please excuse any errors. The original text can be found at: eventmasterbook.de/magazin)
