The Tide Is Finally Turning

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on all

The Tide Is Finally Turning – February 2024

New non-stop flight from Lexington KY to Denver added | Lexington Herald Leader I’m flying to my next conference… well, likely tomorrow as you’re reading this. It’s not Las Vegas, Atlanta, Orlando, San Diego or any of the top destinations. It’s about 20 miles outside of Ft. Lauderdale…and then my next one will be in Nashville. Business conference organizers are sick of being gouged and are now looking to secondary cities to hold their events.

This article from Business Travel News, which details research that was done on bookings in January, shows “meetings business booked in cities outside the firm’s traditional top 25 markets [grew] at a considerably faster pace than in the top-tier group.” Now the data didn’t show the top-tier group shrinking, just growing at a much slower rate. I believe we’ve finally hit the tipping point of all the gouging.

In addition to that, If you visit the site Layoffs.FYI, the numbers of people being thrown out of work now are staggering. These are not from unsuccessful companies reducing staff to survive, these are from firms with profits in the millions and billions making “business decisions” to cut staff – often their dedicated, career individuals. They do it because Wall Street loves it, so it pushes up their stock, so they make more money – as they put hundreds of thousands of dedicated people on the street. I’m sure there may also be the political desire to force a recession where none exists so that they can help force a change in the US White House. But the biggest reason they do it is there is no penalty, no pain. I believe that senior management of highly profitable firms that engage in mass layoffs should trigger an immediately penalty – a sharing of the pain – perhaps in the form of losing their jobs as the decision makers that put the staff in place to begin with, perhaps the losing of their health-care coverage just like the dismissed workers, or being forced to pay for healthcare for all dismissed workers for a year or two. But whatever it is, some negative consequence is needed here for the trend to stop.

These thousands upon thousands of laid-off workers are not traveling to business conferences as much as before…which is forcing conference organizers to scramble to fill seats to attract sponsors…which is forcing organizers to find less gouge-y venues. Sure Vegas, host the F1 race and set-up for the Super Bowl as much as you like, we’ll take our measly 10-50K attended conference and move it to a venue that will appreciate our business.

So, the bottom line here is I believe we’ll all be able to look-back at this point as the start of a trend (so be prepared to look at other venues for your conferences) and until things in large, profitable businesses get fairer, I’d love to publish a list of such firms doing mass layoffs so we could all start boycotting their products and services.

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Actually, I’m serious about that last point. It’s time to hit profitable companies who do this with boycotts. When they’re making more cash than they can carry but treat tens if not hundreds of thousands of employees as bad decisions they can just shrug-off, just to see their stock go up, it’s time to do something. Let me know if you want to help me make/publish/spread the word about a list.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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As always, feel free to write and comment, question or disagree. Hearing from the traveling community is always a highlight for me. Thanks!