Companies are pouring record sums into in-person gatherings, with new figures pointing to a £200bn surge in global corporate event spending by the end of the decade.
Global expenditure on corporate events is on track to climb from £241bn in 2024 to £441.95bn by 2029, according to fresh analysis from Booking.com for Business, as boards reassert the commercial value of bringing teams, clients and prospects into the same room. The forecast, which implies a compound annual growth rate of 10.61%, underscores how decisively the post-pandemic appetite for face-to-face engagement has hardened into a structural shift.
Business-to-business events already generate roughly £1.26 trillion in direct spending globally each year, with the United States and the United Kingdom topping the league table, each hosting more than one million events annually. Orlando, Chicago and Las Vegas alone account for close to 40% of all American corporate gatherings, cementing the convention-belt cities as the centre of gravity for global MICE activity.
Costs, however, are climbing in lockstep with demand. In-person events now carry a 47.8% premium over their virtual equivalents, with large-format meetings costing organisers as much as £260,000 to stage. The economic pay-off remains compelling: international delegates spend up to four times more than domestic attendees, making cross-border events a meaningful contributor to host-city economies. The trajectory mirrors wider corporate travel patterns, with UK firms ranking second globally for the sharpest rise in business travel spending in 2025.
The shape of the modern event is also shifting. Hybrid formats have moved from novelty to default, with 80% of planners now running events that blend physical and digital audiences. Sustainability has graduated from box-ticking to a planning priority, with 83% of organisers factoring environmental impact into venue, catering and travel decisions. Artificial intelligence is taking on the heavy lifting behind the scenes, with 58% of planners using AI tools to manage logistics, contracts and budgets, a trend Travelling For Business has tracked as cost pressure pushes the MICE sector toward premium clients and localised supply chains.
That cost discipline matters. The Global Business Travel Association expects per-attendee event costs to rise 3.7% in 2025 and a further 2.4% in 2026, broadly in line with G20 inflation but layered on top of a market in which premium venues remain in short supply. Buyers, in other words, will pay more for less capacity, a dynamic also driving the growing crossover between corporate events and the all-inclusive resort model, with destination properties increasingly courting MICE planners as full-service hosts.
Nadine Blokker, corporate travel expert at Booking.com for Business, said companies needed to apply the same strategic rigour to events as they do to their wider travel programmes. “Early planning and streamlined booking tools take a significant amount of stress out of the process for travelling teams,” she said, urging organisers to bring events into the same governance framework as managed travel.
For an industry that spent the early 2020s questioning its own future, the message from the latest data is unambiguous. Budgets are rising, demand is accelerating, and the business events sector is entering a new phase defined by technology, sustainability and a renewed corporate appetite for being in the room.