I posed this question last month but didn’t get much of a response. So, I’m asking it again: Is there anyone out there who is still planning to attend a conference or event this year?

The lack of much response to my question may actually say more about the health (or illness) of the conference business than anyone cares to admit, but I remain committed to getting a good fix on how the terrible state of the economy is affecting discretionary travel.

Here are a couple of nuggets I’ve picked up since I wrote my original post on this subject nearly a month ago:

• The Training 2009 Conference & Expo in Atlanta on February 9 and 10 saw a drop from 2,000 attendees in 2008 (when I attended the event) to about 800 this year. That’s a 60 percent falloff. Although I didn’t attend this year’s event, my information comes from a well-regarded speaker who was there. He asked to not be identified because he hopes to speak at the event again in the future. He gets around to a lot of these events, so I trust him to be a knowledgeable and independent observer.

• The Society for Human Resource Management is expecting a big drop in attendance for its 61st annual conference and exhibition. A SHRM spokesperson tells Workforce Management that the organization expects fewer than 10,000 paid attendees in New Orleans at the end of June, and that’s down from about 13,600 last year in Chicago and around 15,000 attendees for the 2007 SHRM conference in Las Vegas. In other words, they expect roughly 33 percent fewer paid attendees in 2009 than they saw just two years ago.

These are pretty ugly numbers, and since we are just now getting into the heavy part of the 2009 conference season, I expect to hear even uglier attendance figures from the many HR, recruiting, compensation, technology and training events coming up over the next three months.

And these new numbers support this point in my last blog: The original February projection, by the industry trade group Meeting Professionals International and American Express, which predicted a 5 percent attendance drop at those meetings and conferences that are still being held, is way too low. I’ve seen other forecasts that project a conference attendance drop of 7 to 8 percent, but from all I am seeing and hearing, I think the actual number could easily be double that or more, down anywhere from 15 to 25 percent. It may be even worse for events in the latter part of the year.

Have a different perspective on this? I’d really want to know if people are still out there traveling in 2009 as they did in the past. I would love to get some feedback, 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.

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