Kevin Iwamoto of Bizly talks about what event planners should be doing differently right now.

As pandemic concerns ease and gathering restrictions are lifted, how has the business of in-person meetings and events changed? What should we be doing differently now? What’s the outlook for the near future? In this episode of Eventful: The Podcast for Meeting Professionals, Northstar’s vice president and content director, Loren Edelstein, talks with Kevin Iwamoto, chief customer officer for Bizly, about new realities and how planners can avoid troublesome surprises.

Among topics addressed:

How to justify the value of large in-person events as a necessity for business growth and opportunities (3:14)

Why in-person audiences will be smaller, and why we’ll still need to offer virtual options to participants (4:15)

Emerging meeting formats, such as holding smaller events in geographic regions rather than one national meeting, or holding one conference with digitized content for remote audiences (6:10)

How compression and labor shortages are affecting negotiations and service levels. (6:10)

The important questions planners should be asking in their RFPs and RFI’s about staffing and on-site services (7:00)

What happens if an attendee gets sick during the event? Can they stay in the hotel, or do they need to leave? (9:07)

Who covers the cost of travelers who fall ill and need to quarantine in a hotel — the host organization, the person’s employer, or the attendees themselves? (10:15)

Why we should be patient and empathize with hotels doing their best to run a property that isn’t fully staffed (14:20)

How meeting professionals learned to cope with the pandemic and are well positioned to move forward with confidence (16:50)