5 Trends That Will Define Events for Years to Come

The Pacific Room at Long Beach Convention Center. (Courtesy Long Beach Convention Center)

Innovation strategist Amy Blackman has a personal rule on airplanes — flying time is “me time”— which she helps enforce by wearing a big blue set of headphones when she travels. But during a flight to Pittsburgh in January 2019, Blackman found herself without her headphones, and sitting next to a passenger who couldn’t help himself from noticing the presentation she was polishing on her laptop.

The curious passenger was Joseph Jenci, a senior vice president for sales and service at Long Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau (LBCVB), who, like Blackman, was headed to PCMA’s Convening Leaders, where Blackman was to co-present the results of a yearlong, global study about future trends.

Jenci attended the standing-room-only session, where he was struck by the fact that every one of five trends outlined in the report, The Future of Meetings & Events, already was visible back home at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center (LBCEC).  And when Blackman, who lives in Southern California, visited the Long Beach campus a few weeks later for a tour, “my mind was blown,” she said.  “What I was witnessing was the physical manifestation of everything in the trends report  — everything researchers had thought about, written about, and synthesized for the past year. It was a living case study.”

Read about the five trends, and what they mean for the future of event spaces by downloading the white paper.