The year started out on a high note, with meeting and event planners anticipating a big upswing in everything from headcounts to bookings. Now that high note is less clear — what a difference a few months has made.

While it’s just a snapshot, not yet a trend, Meeting Professionals International’s Q2 2025 Meetings Outlook survey found that fewer than a third of meeting professionals and hospitality partners anticipate favorable business conditions over the next year, while well over half (57%) think things are not going to shape up well moving forward.

This is a big nosedive from Q1, where the survey found almost 70% anticipating a good year for meetings and events and just around 10% thought it was going to be a tough year for them.

It’s even a bigger dose of negativity than planners and hospitality professionals expressed in MPI’s quarterly survey in Q2 2020, just as the scope of the effect the COVID-19 pandemic on meetings and events was beginning to become apparent. Back then, as meeting cancellations began to snowball due to travel restrictions and moratoriums on group gatherings, 36% still thought the next 12 months would be good for their business, compared to 31% in Q2 2025.

While the results are disheartening, the survey responses also were collected between March 31 and April 11, which was a very unsettled, and unsettling, period in time. As results were being collected, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his “reciprocal tariff” plan and 10% tariffs on imports from most countries. China punched back just as hard, announcing steep tariffs of its own on imported U.S. goods. The financial markets went on a dizzying roller-coaster as a result, with stock exchanges around the world experiencing the biggest selloffs since the start of the pandemic. Then Trump announced he was pausing the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days and things began to stabilize somewhat, but that volatility had an obvious effect on meeting planner outlooks for the rest of the year.

Meeting and event planners, like financial markets, don’t respond well to the uncertainty such wide fluctuations can cause, or the impact it can have on their own businesses and those of their supplier partners. Hence the dramatic drop in optimism — the worst in the 12 years MPI has been conducting its quarterly Meetings Outlook surveys.

As disheartening as the Q2 2025 Meetings Outlook survey — which received a total of 230 unique responses (53 percent from suppliers, 47 percent from planners) — may be, the parallels between 2020 and 2025 aren’t exact. Specifically, budget and in-person attendance projections are still ahead of where they were in pandemic times.

Stay tuned for an update when MPI releases the full report, which will be published later this month.