Roger Dow, president and CEO of U.S. Travel, and Meetings Mean Business co-chairs Mike Massari and Fred Dixon announced at WEC Vegas on Wednesday the launch of Let’s Meet There—a campaign to help expedite the widespread safe return of professional meetings and events.

Now that growth in leisure is moving along positively, Dow said the decision was made to shift some of their focus to drive attention to the business travel space.

“Professional meetings and events are indispensable for our economies,” he said.

The campaign’s goal is to educate the government and the C-suite about how professional meetings can be executed with very low risk of becoming super-spreader events.

“It’s so important that we get our elected leaders and corporate CEOs to understand that we’ve got to get traveling again,” without it, we won’t really return to the economy that we want or expect, he said, noting the campaign will proceed with three main objectives: lead with data, communicate with a consistent message and make the case for change.

Yesterday, U.S. Travel published a study by The Ohio State University public health experts that explores why business events are well-suited to effectively maintain health and safety.

Sadly, the business travel side of our industry isn’t growing to the extent we’d like. Only one-third of organizations that typically leverage business travel still have their employees on the road right now. Zoom is great if you know your audience already, Dow said, but not especially valuable when meeting people for the first time. He added that business travel, on its current recovery trajectory, isn’t expected to reach pre-pandemic levels until 2024—unless we advocate and educate leaders and stakeholders.

“I think WEC is a great example of Let’s Meet There—this is what happens [at business events],” Massari said. “Of course, full recovery of the travel economy isn’t possible unless you have meetings and events,” specifically pointing out how essential meetings and events are for the Las Vegas economy.

While business meetings and events account for an estimated 40 percent to 60 percent of all lodging and air travel revenue, Dixon pointed out it’s not just travel and hospitality companies that benefit from business travel. Business travel and professional events, he said, are the lifeblood of many non-travel-related companies due to business connections linked to meetings.

“We need our federal leaders to assist to help accelerate the return of the business travel segment in the weeks and months to come,” he said.

Asked about the much-discussed U.S.-UK travel corridor, Dow said it seemed like things were progressing positively, but then the COVID-19 Delta variant hit the UK.

“I expect in the next month or so having a message come out from [U.S. President Biden’s] administration about opening up [the U.S.-UK corridor].”