Events across the USA in 2021: Leading Demand Indicators Report for April 12, 2021

Welcome to the first Leading Demand Indicators report. In these weekly reports, we detail the state of events being scheduled across the United States so companies can keep their finger on the pulse of one of the most reliable indicators of incoming demand: events.

Factoring demand-driving events into your forecasts is one of the few ways to provide certainty to your staffing, inventory and pricing strategies in 2021’s chaotic, fragmented and much-anticipated pandemic recovery period.

Given how critical insight into events is for most businesses, the PredictHQ team decided to start publishing this weekly report. Use it as a lay-of-the-land outline. If you want access to the details of all the impactful events (date, time, lat-long, predicted attendance and projected impact ranking and more), get in touch with our team directly. 

Demand Intelligence API Improve forecasts, operational platforms, event calendars & more. Learn More

Events are back: 42% increase in new events being booked this month

This time last year, scheduled attended events such as sports games, concerts and conferences were being cancelled at an unprecedented rate. Billions of dollars of event-driven demand was wiped out in the space of a few weeks (more information about our work tracking this can be found in Recode and CNBC).

The US headed into a very quiet few months on the ground, while businesses underwent massive changes to meet displaced demand. As attended events return, some of the nascent established patterns will change as footfall and demand increase.

There are thousands of new events being scheduled each week, as well as postponed events being rebooked. As you can see from this map, event cancellations (the red dots) and reschedules (purple dots) continue. Events are always dynamic, and we expect them to be especially so this year.

What kind of events were scheduled last week?

Community events, concerts and sports games were among the most scheduled events this week. PredictHQ tracks 19 categories of events. The below graph only covers seven: the larger of the attended, scheduled events such as sports and concerts.

Community events can range from 25 people to more than 25,000 people, and some of the more notable community events in the next month include:

• Varsity Spirit US Finals in Pensacola, Florida on the weekend of April 17 +18, with more than 9,300 people expected each day.

• Outdoor Art Show on the weekend of April 30 - 2 May in Fairhope, Alabama with over 250,000 people expected.

• Ridgeland Fine Arts Festival in Ridgeland, Mississippi on April 30 - May 2 with 25,000 people expected.

Sports have come roaring back, with major league baseball leading the way with allowing fans back into stadiums. Based on our predicted attendance per game and some calculations based on a survey of sports fans around how often they eat out, how much they spend and how they get to sports games, we estimate the potential demand value of major league baseball games in April is more than $170 million for restaurants, retail and transport providers.

The rise in concerts aligns with the opening of venues we are seeing across the United States. (PredictHQ tracks millions of venues all over the world), and is best brought to life by the boom in Las Vegas’s event plans best seen in the next graph.

Which cities experienced the most rapid event recoveries this week?

Las Vegas was the busiest city this week by far, with a boom in performing arts events being scheduled as more of its venues re-opened or announced plans to re-open.

While this is much welcome news after last year, it’s only around 20% of the venues that were running events in 2019. These surges are only going to increase as vaccination rates increase, restrictions ease and venues re-open. 

Many of our customers are tracking both events and venues opening, especially those in the transport industry, as well as quick-serve retail industries, where a concert hall or stadium coming back online is a critical prompt to get nearby locations staffed and stocked properly.

State in focus: California

America’s most populous state has had some of the tightest restrictions throughout the pandemic. 

The announcement this week from California’s Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly that the state will be fully open for business in June is expected to spark a major upwards trend in event bookings, including the return of some of the nation’s largest conferences and expos.

While the announcement was barely a week ago, we are already seeing a surge in bookings beginning across major California cities.

This report seeks to outline the general trajectory and trends of event recovery across the United States. But to make the most of events in your forecasting, you will need to use programmatic solutions given how dynamic and large a dataset events are. PredictHQ is supplying our customers with the world’s impactful events via our restful API of verified and standardized events across 19 categories. 

To find out how leading companies such as Uber, Domino’s and major hotel chains are using this data, explore our use cases.

We will be releasing weekly editions of this Leading Demand Indicators report. Sign up to receive it in your inbox early each week.