I hate to always be the bearer of bad news, but here’s how bad it is for business conference travel this year: “U.S. companies canceled an estimated $1 billion worth of conferences in the first two months of this year and trimmed back on others,” according to a story in today’s Los Angeles Times.

This shouldn’t be a news flash to readers of this blog, because I have been writing about this trend since the beginning of the year (see “In 2009, Are Conferences Going, Going Gone?”). It’s been very clear to me that there has been a great deal of denial around business and conference travel, particularly why it’s happening and how bad it actually is (see “2009 Conference Update: It’s Ugly, and Getting Uglier”).

What is news in all this is the fact that: a) We’re finally getting some honesty instead of just wishful thinking when it comes to 2009 conference travel; and, b) That the business and conference travel industry still believes (wrongly) that the problem is simply due to the mess at American International Group, when in fact, it can really be attributed to our larger economic downturn.

The Los Angeles Times story says that hoteliers and other industry executives are calling the current conference travel “the AIG effect, after the insurance company that took a public drubbing for spending freely on corporate perks despite its financial turmoil.” This is certainly true, but only up to a point, because it doesn’t fully explain the massive drop-off.

The bigger issue, in my view, is the huge economic downturn that every business and organization in America is dealing with right now. Yes, the finger can be pointed at AIG (and Wells Fargo, and others) for taking government bailout funds and then continuing to travel and do business as usual, and for the public backlash that ensued, but that’s not the real cause of the problem. The real issue is pretty simple.

When times get tough, discretionary travel gets whacked at virtually every company—big and small. And, that’s really why a billion dollars in conference travel got whacked in January and February.

“With bookings dropping and self-denial replacing conspicuous consumption, the AIG effect is battering a hospitality business that was already suffering from a slowdown related to the recession,” the Times story said. And it also pointed out this fact: “Nearly 200,000 travel-related jobs were lost in 2008,” before the “AIG effect” took hold. The Labor Department expects another quarter-million of those jobs to be lost this year, but that says to me the impact of AIG on conference and business travel is wildly misleading.

In the HR and workforce management space, conferences are seeing attendance drops of anywhere from 30 to 50 percent. For example, Training 2009 in Atlanta in February reportedly had 800 attendees this year, compared with 2,000 a year ago. Another conference, the 2009 ERE Spring Expo at the San Diego Convention Center last month, reportedly had 500 total attendees compared with around 1,100 at the same event in San Diego last year.

This doesn’t bode well for some of the other large HR-related conferences later this spring, such as the IHRIM Technology conference in San Diego this month, and both the WorldatWork Total Rewards gathering in Seattle and the ASTD Conference and Exhibition in Washington at the end of May. I expect similar attendance drops at all of these traditionally well-attended HR industry events.

Of course, SHRM’s annual conference in New Orleans at the end of June is already bracing for a lot fewer attendees this year than last year’s event in Chicago, and I’m afraid that not even Jack Welch as a keynote speaker can help with that.

So, I ask again: Have you canceled any HR or workforce industry conference travel this year? How many fewer events are you going to and what impact has the recession (or even the AIG effect) had on you and your organization’s travel this year?

I’d love to know, so either attach a comment at the end of this blog post or send it to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com.

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