Dear UFI members, dear colleagues,

Our spring conferences season is in full swing. Last month, we welcomed more than 220 colleagues at our Asia-Pacific Conference in Kuala Lumpur. Later this month, our members from Latin America and beyond will meet in San José, Costa Rica, for the LatAm Conference. Then it’s over to Doha, Qatar, for the MEA Conference in May, and we’ll wrap up in June with a whole events week in Maastricht, co-locating the European Conference with two Forums on HR and Operations – and premiering the new, already sold out, “Event Directors Summit”.

And while we are busy preparing and producing these events for you, a lot of work is taking place already around our Global Congress next November in Las Vegas. I was in the States just a few days ago for the SISO Summit, and it was great to see the interest in our Congress already being so high within the industry.

Michael Duck writes about advocacy in his column this month. Through our work on this, we know about the challenges and bottlenecks that still trouble us as an industry around airline capacities, hotel room availabilities, and visa wait times. That is why we have pushed ahead and already launched the Congress registration for Las Vegas. We secured hotel room capacity at our Congress hotel, the Aria, essentially for pre-inflation rates. If you need to apply for a visa, we are already able to send you the invitation letters. And we are passing on the price advantages we have to you, our members, if you sign up early enough. You can sign up and lock this all in for November at www.uficongress.org

All of this happens as our industry is growing steadily. When we released the latest UFI Barometer data in early February, I said that the time of the “post-pandemic recovery” is over, and that the next chapter of our industry is beginning. And rightly so – the confidence in our business model is very visible right now with a flurry of mergers & acquisitions making the headlines in the general business media. Transactions of more than 6 billion dollars in one week alone – this shows that investors are for sure putting their money into the solid future of our face-to-face events industry.