Here’s a question I just can’t get a good answer to: Is there anyone out there who is still planning to attend a conference or event this year?

Here’s another way to ask that: Given the terrible state of the economy, the never-ending layoffs and cutbacks, and the less-than-stellar outlook for the near future, who still has money to spend on discretionary travel?

This is a hard thing to get a handle on given that conference organizers don’t want to tell you if their advance signups are bad, lest they make things the worse. A New York Times story this week with the headline “As the Recession Waxes, Business Meetings Wane,” actually quantified what’s going on:

“According to a survey released last month that was conducted by the industry trade group Meeting Professionals International and American Express, 7 percent of business meetings already scheduled for 2009 have been canceled. And attendance is expected to be down by about 5 percent at those meetings that are still being held, the survey found.”

This surprised me. An expected attendance drop of only 5 percent? Most conference organizers would probably take that in a heartbeat, because the early feedback I’m getting from people attending (or well-informed about) HR events taking place in the first quarter of 2009 indicates that event attendance is off anywhere from 30 to 50 percent. That’s just anecdotal evidence, of course, but I’m hearing it from people who either have firsthand experience as attendees or are pretty plugged in to conference organizers.

Stephen E. Arnold wrote about this on his Beyond Search blog, where he noted that a startup and product-launch conference called Demo (held near Palm Springs, California) “is just one of many conferences facing a tough market with an approach that strikes me as expensive and better suited for an economy past. … Valentine’s Day is over. I surmise the traditional conference business is headed in that direction as well.”

That’s a great observation: How can traditional conferences and events, particularly in the HR and management space, survive this year operating in a “business as usual” mode? And, how many people still have budgets to attend events in 2009 that are largely based on what they paid in the relatively good times of 2008?

Hotel room rates are a particular problem. For example, HR Week in New York in early May lists a room rate at Hilton New York of $308 per night for attendees, not including New York state sales tax, New York City sales tax, and the New York hotel occupancy tax. These can add around 20 percent to the room rate, making that $310 rate more like $370 per night—and who still has a travel budget in this economy that can accommodate $370-per-night hotel rooms in notoriously pricey New York?

No one in the HR space is as invested in conferences as much as the Society for Human Resource Management. SHRM has no fewer than six conferences on its calendar for 2009. One, the Employment Law and Legislative Conference being held at Washington’s Capital Hilton hotel in March, is listed on the SHRM Web site as being sold out, but a staffing and management conference scheduled for March at the Las Vegas Hilton (ground zero in the conference travel war) just announced a cut in the attendee hotel room rate from $169 per night to $99 per night, and a discounted conference registration fee of $895 for SHRM members registering by February 20. That discounting tells you a little bit about what might be going on.

Still, I wonder: What kind of attendance will SHRM get at its 61st annual conference and exhibition, to be held this year from June 28 to July 1 in New Orleans? The numbers were down a bit for last year’s event in Chicago compared with the 2007 SHRM conference in Las Vegas, but I’m sure SHRM is concerned about a much larger drop-off in 2009 given the killer combination of a terrible economy, big layoffs, budget cuts and a late-June event in hot and steamy Louisiana.

Is anyone out there traveling in 2009 as they did in the past? Are you continuing to attend conferences and events, or have you cut back this year in the face of the ongoing recession? Are you going to SHRM New Orleans? I’d love to get some feedback from what you are experiencing, either here as a comment added to this blog or by e-mail sent to me at jhollon@workforce.com. I may use the best comments in a future blog post.

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.