It all begins with an idea.

The US pre-pandemic $100 billion trade show and exhibition industry will be permanently changed by COVID-19, along with smaller events like corporate meetings, Tin Fan predicts. In particular, hybrid meetings with both virtual and in-person attendance are here to stay, she says. Her prediction on meetings and events management grooms clients in this brave new world of arranging get-togethers, big and small, for corporations, professional associations, and other groups.

I know probably hundreds of people who have lost their job on both the supplier side, like the hotels, and on the planner side. Some [planners’] specialties were so much face-to-face meetings that people didn’t figure out how to transfer to virtual. The other thing is, a lot of organizations made the decision, “We know Zoom, we don’t need as many meeting planners.”

A lot of planners are doing huge amounts of virtual meetings. What people don’t understand is, a well-designed, well-run virtual meeting takes as much work as an in-person one. More than the logistics, how do you make it interesting? How do you make it entertaining? How do you chop it up? How do you find the right speakers, who may be different speakers than those who present face-to-face? How do you use a breakout room in Zoom? What do we do with meals—do we send them gift packs and DoorDash cards and wine packages?

You can run an all-day meeting virtually. You have to know how to cue people, change screens, put up graphics.

For Hybrid meetings, people can attend face to face or virtually. People nowadays have trouble affording travel, most people are paying out of pocket. It’s hard planning meetings with people in front of you on a computer screen.

Everything from graphics to how people appear on the screen if you’re in the room versus remotely [to] thinking out your roomset—how the tables and chairs are set up. To make that person watching remotely feel involved, maybe you would film from one of the chairs in a crescent, so they are now sitting at a table with people. They are part of it, not watching from the sidelines.

Will Events go back to normal?

I think almost everything will have a hybrid component. They may not have the 3,000- or 5,000-people event; maybe they’ll do East Coast and West Coast events.

I think Event planners are going to get hired back sooner but much of the gathering will be virtual.

Everything I’ve been hearing in the industry—when it will be back to 2019 numbers—I’m hearing 2023.