Have Hospitality Trade Shows Gone the Way of the Dodo?

I have attended hospitality industry trade shows for nearly three decades. Early in my career in hospitality technology, they were essential: the exhibit hall was where buyers learned who the key players were and which solutions might fit their needs. Today, that discovery happens long before anyone boards a plane. A hotel buyer can search the web, read peer reviews, or simply ask an AI assistant to list the vendors that fit their operation and rank them by fit.

The data bears this out. In a Gartner survey of B2B buyers released in March 2026, 67% said they prefer a buying experience without a sales rep, and 45% said they had used AI during a recent purchase. That survey spans all industries, and hospitality is different. Ours is a service business built on relationships, and hoteliers still expect, and value, a close bond with the people who sell to them. But even in our industry, the way buyers do their homework is changing. A 2025 study by Responsive found that nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers now use generative AI as much as or more than traditional search when researching vendors. So, are trade shows extinct? Not yet. But the exhibit hall as we know it is on the endangered list.

The paradox of the booth

For the better part of a decade, the marketing teams at most hospitality technology companies have told executives like me that the return on exhibiting rarely justifies the cost: floor space, booth shipping, setup, power, internet, catering, travel, and the countless other line items that come with a show. Yet every year, we make the investment anyway. Why?

The first reason is fear. Ours is a small industry, absence gets noticed, and not being there can make a louder statement than being there. The second is that even when a show fails to produce enough qualified leads to justify the spend, the chance to meet existing clients and prospects face-to-face still matters. Anyone who remembers the isolation of the COVID-19 years knows how starved our industry was for that kind of interaction.

Ask any salesperson whether trade shows are obsolete and you will get an emphatic “no.” They have a bias, of course, but an understandable one. Even if they do not land a single new lead, a show lets them see more customers and prospects in three days than they could in a month on the road.

To be fair, the numbers do not yet show an industry in decline. HITEC 2026 in San Antonio sold out its exhibit floor in the spring and started a waiting list, then drew more than 6,100 attendees and more than 400 exhibiting companies. CEIR, the exhibition industry’s research arm, reports that face-to-face exhibitions account for 41% of B2B exhibitors’ marketing budgets, and it forecasts 2.1% growth for the exhibition market in 2026. Those figures tell me the habit is intact. They do not tell me the model is working. CEIR itself describes exhibitors as increasingly selective about where they show up, and a full exhibit floor is not the same thing as a full pipeline.

Events will endure. The exhibit hall may not.

I want to be precise here: I do not believe industry events will ever become obsolete. Hospitality buyers, sellers, and influencers have a genuine need to come together to share thought leadership, explore industry trends, collaborate on best practices, and, perhaps most important of all, catch up with old industry friends over a cocktail. What I believe will become increasingly rare is the large exhibit-hall trade show.

The educational and thought-leadership conferences that grew up alongside those shows may live on indefinitely, but in a different shape: a conference format where vendors sponsor and send a small team of senior people, rather than shipping a booth and staffing it with an entire sales force during “show hours.” As a business leader, I would rather send three or four of my most senior sellers to five or six focused conferences, where they can spend real time with high-value customers and prospects, than send 20 people to stand in a booth waiting for foot traffic.

This also reflects how buying now works. If a hotel group has already built its shortlist through its own research, increasingly with the help of AI, before anyone walks the floor, then the booth is no longer where discovery happens. What remains valuable is everything that comes after: the candid exchange with a peer, the chance to test a vendor’s judgment, the relationship that gives a buyer confidence in a decision. Those moments happen in meeting rooms, at dinners, and in hallway conversations, not in a 20-by-20 booth.

The rise of the customer event

Where I see growing value is in customer events, and in vendors sponsoring one another’s. I know some leaders question the worth of user conferences, but I believe they are, and will remain, one of the most important investments a technology company can make. They give a company the chance to show customers what is on the roadmap, to demonstrate that it is listening to their requests, and to let customers network with one another and share best practices for getting the most out of the platform.

There is evidence that this engagement pays off. When customer success software company Gainsight studied five years of data from its own Pulse user conference, it found that customers who sent employees to the event had logo retention 13 percentage points higher, and net retention 41 points higher, than customers who did not. That is correlation rather than proof, since engaged customers are more likely to attend in the first place, but few vendors would turn down numbers like those.

User conferences are also an ideal venue for ecosystem partners. When a company invites its certified integration partners to exhibit at its user conference, those partners are in front of an audience that already runs the host’s platform and is actively looking for the integrations and automation that will make their work lives easier. For the invited partner, a well-attended user conference can be a far better source of qualified leads than a booth in a general exhibit hall, often at a fraction of the cost.

Look at the scale some of these events have reached. Salesforce’s Dreamforce draws close to 50,000 people to San Francisco each year, and the partners exhibiting there are not hoping to be discovered by passersby; they are in front of an audience built around a single platform. Sales engagement company Sendoso reported $10 million in pipeline from a single Dreamforce, with three times as many sales meetings booked as the year before. Closer to home, Oracle Hospitality brought its Hospitality Summit to Europe for the first time in January 2026, in London, and partners built on the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform signed on as sponsors to meet the hoteliers already running Oracle systems.

So, have trade shows gone the way of the dodo?

Not entirely, and not yet. Exhibit floors are still selling out, and companies are still writing the checks. But in the traditional sense, with the cavernous hall, the sprawling booth, and the army of sellers waiting for traffic, I believe they are heading that way, and faster than many in our industry want to admit. The future belongs to smaller, sharper gatherings built around conversation rather than square footage.

I would love to hear your thoughts, from both sides of the booth. Vendors: are you still exhibiting, and is it paying off? Hoteliers: when was the last time you actually shopped for a new solution on a trade show floor?