93% of planners say they are optimistic about 2027. Spend per attendee is up 28% and nobody is cancelling.

Asked at IMEX America last week whether clients are cutting events because costs have risen, Caesars Entertainment chief sales officer Michael Massari told Skift Meetings "absolutely not." The survey data agrees with him. In Amex GBT's 2027 forecast, 93% of meeting professionals called themselves optimistic about the sector, up from 85% a year earlier, and cost per attendee is expected to rise across every meeting type.

Buyers do not accept rising unit costs in a channel they are leaving. They accept them in a channel they are committed to, and the commitment is showing up in the one number that is hardest to fake: average incentive spend reached $6,900 per person excluding airfare, up 28% from 2024, while the average trip fell from 4.6 nights to 4.3.

The money per head went up while the trip got shorter

Read those two figures together. The incentive trip gained about $1,500 a head and lost a third of a night. Everyone is paying more to leave earlier.

That is not belt tightening, it is concentration. Fewer nights means fewer filler sessions and more of the day spent in the part of the program that justified the invitation. The same compression is visible in what it now costs to move people at all: in its June 2026 industry trends report, Maritz put its average ticketed domestic airfare at $604 in the second quarter, up 19% in a year, and its average international ticket at $1,177, up 27%. When the trip is the expensive part, the room has to earn it.

Domestic held. The long haul did not

The decline everyone quoted from Las Vegas last week is real, and it is specific. Maritz's verified on site attendance at April and May trade shows was down 4% in 2025 and a further 6% in 2026 against the same events, leaving international roughly 10% below two years earlier. Domestic attendance held. On the registration side, Maritz told Skift that international registrations across its association and trade show clients fell 12% in 2026 after an 8% drop in 2025.

One number, falling. Not attendance, not budget, not appetite: the overseas traveler to a US show.

IMEX America is the exception that proves it. The show set a record with more than 17,800 participants and roughly 96,000 scheduled meetings, and about 4,800 of its 6,000 plus buyers came through a hosted buyer program that pays their flights and accommodation in exchange for six to eight meetings a day. 70% of those buyers were based in the United States. Where somebody covers the airfare, the international room still fills, which is the same lesson we drew when private equity started buying trade shows and meetings booked became the KPI the organizer owns.

Planners are buying more cities, not bigger booths

Amex GBT's respondents told it what they intend to do about it. 39% have already changed a destination or city because of geopolitical instability. North American planners said they plan to meet closer to home and build in longer lead times. 37% said they would run more virtual events, which is the honest counterweight in this data, and the one line in the forecast that argues against the room.

Nobody counts events per company, so the next step is our read rather than a published figure: a budget that holds its total, meets closer to home and spends more per head has to produce more rooms, in more cities, with fewer people in each. The shape of 2027 is a calendar, not a floor plan.

For the field marketer this is the better market, with one condition attached. More rooms means more conversations and more follow up, and the industry's existing record on that is poor enough that a bigger calendar can quietly make the attribution problem worse rather than better. The leads that get captured still come home as badge photos with no context. Eight cities will produce eight times that problem unless the capture is solved before the invitations go out, which is why the budget keeps following proof rather than performance.

The position. Events are growing as a channel in 2027, measured in money per attendee and in number of rooms rather than in bodies through a turnstile, and the teams who cut their largest booth and spend the difference across four cities will book more qualified conversations than they did this year. If they cannot show where those conversations went, the growth will be invisible in January, and the budget will go back to the booth that at least came with a photo.