Meeting professionals expect a favorable year

of meeting professionals expect favorable business conditions over the next year, and 61% expect live attendance to grow. 73% say purposeful event design will be very important or essential to business outcomes over the next two years.

The context for the MPI arc matters: Q2 2025 was the least-positive reading in that survey's history (31% favorable); the Q3 2026 recovery to 60% is the story, and it is a survey of expectations, not a count of events.

The trend

Read in sequence, this is a recovery curve with a destination. A profession that bottomed out at 31% favorable in the second quarter of 2025 has climbed back to 60%, and the composition of the optimism matters as much as its size. The expectation of growing live attendance, held by 61%, says the recovery is expected to arrive in person, in rooms, at events that have to be programmed and staffed. And the 73% who call purposeful event design essential to business outcomes describe the terms on which that recovery will be judged: not gatherings for their own sake, but designed experiences expected to produce something a sponsor can name.

An expectations survey is a leading indicator, not a ledger. It measures what meeting professionals believe is coming, and belief is what budgets are made of in the quarters before the events themselves happen. When the people who plan meetings expect favorable conditions, they plan more ambitiously: longer programs, fuller production, and a willingness to commit to speakers earlier in the cycle. The number to watch is not whether the optimism proves correct in every case. It is that the optimism is now the working assumption inside the rooms where next year's programs are being built.

What this means for a planner booking a speaker this quarter

It means you are buying in a market that has decided to recover, and the terms of that market favor the early. When most of your peers expect favorable conditions and growing attendance, the speakers with the strongest films and the fullest calendars are being approached first, and their dates are being taken while other committees are still drafting their theme. A planner who waits for certainty will find it, along with a shorter list of available names. This quarter, the booking calendar rewards the committee that treats its program as a design problem now: theme fixed early, anchor positions filled while the field is open, and the program built around outcomes the sponsor can repeat back, because that is the standard 73% of the profession says it will be judged by.

It also means the burden of proof has shifted inside your own organization. In a pessimistic year, a modest program needs no defense. In a recovery year, a modest program reads as a missed market. The speaker you book this quarter will be evaluated against the attendance your peers expect to grow and the design standard your own profession has set, so the case for the booking should be built the same way: the room it will fill, the outcome it is designed to produce, stated before the contract, not reconstructed after the event.

The one move

Fix your program's theme and fill the anchor keynote slot this quarter, before the general call season opens, while the speakers your committee actually wants still have the date.

Source: MPI Meetings Outlook, Q3 2026 (MPI with IMEX) · Period/scope: Q3 2026 · Survey of meeting professionals · Global · mpi.org/meetingsoutlook · Desk reviewed: October 24, 2026

Readings are published with their source, reporting period, and geographic scope, and are labeled with the date the desk last reviewed them. Historical readings are never presented as live. Desk updated October 2026.