Upcoming events in the USA in 2021: Leading Demand Indicators for May 10

This is our fifth weekly report about the promising return of attended events such as sports, festivals and expos across the USA as vaccinations increase and restrictions ease. This week we want to share a particularly exciting insight into how events are tracking this year from October to December (Q4).

Q4 is a particularly interesting topic at the moment as it is when many are anticipating life can truly begin to feel more like 2019 rather than 2020 in the USA again.

Using events as a leading indicator of economic recovery, the outlook is promising. When we compare how many events are scheduled for Q4 in 2021 at this time, compared to 2019, 2021 is already sitting at at least 75% of events (with more than 300 attendees) booked i.e.

• In May 2019, 5,550 events were booked for October

• In May 2021, 4,666 events were booked for October, which is about 84% of 2019

If this doesn’t sound like many events for October 2019 to you, you are correct. Most events are booked about three months in advance. We have found the forward booking rate to be a useful factor in our work to calculate COVID recovery rates for each event type. 

With event scheduling soaring (up by 93% in the last four weeks compared to the previous four weeks), businesses need to ensure they have the intelligent event data they need to track the fragmented and highly dynamic return of events across the USA. External data like this is critical to tapping into upcoming surges in demand.

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For example, many of our customers are in the transport, food retail and accommodation industries. For these companies, concerts and conferences are high impact, so they are carefully calibrating their inventory and labor management strategies to each new event scheduled. 

In the below image, we compared the number of new events that have been identified by our systems in the last week for conferences, concerts and then all attended events (including sports, festivals, expos, community events and performing arts).

More than 25,000 concerts have been scheduled in 2021 already

Concerts continue to be one of the most frequently scheduled event types, with thousands of new concerts, big and small, being booked in each week. This is compared to the previous week when sports was the most active category by a significant margin as Minor League Baseball game locations and TV schedules were confirmed.

Here are the new US events that our systems identified this week by category:

This year, 25,389 concerts have been scheduled so far and the event recovery is only just getting started. More than 7,000 of these have more than 500 attendees, and therefore drive significant impact for transport and hospitality providers near these venues.

Some of the notable concerts coming up include:

• Brad Paisley on July 8 in Jacksonville, Florida  with 4,100 people expected

• Dave Matthews Band on July 28 in Tampa, Florida with 15,000 people expected

• Green Day with Fall out Boy and Weezeron July 14 in Seattle, Washington, with 28,700 people expected

• David Archuleta on August 21 in Orem, Utah, with 2,100 people expected

• Marc Anthony on August 27 in San Antonio,Texas, with 11,400 people expected

• Maroon 5 on August 16 in Dallas, Texas with 12,000 people expected

• Luke Bryan on July 16 in Hartford, Connecticut, with 18,000 people expected

• Jamey Johnson with Whiskey Myers on June 12 in Des Moines, Iowa, with 15,000 people expected

• Chicago and Their Greatest Hits on June 29 in Charlotte, North Carolina, with 11,700 people expected

Event scheduling growing in volume across the USA

When we first began publishing these reports (see the full set here), Las Vegas was the busiest city by a considerable margin. While New York city has seen some notable surges as restrictions ease, more cities are increasing the rate of events being booked as sports games with fan attendance continue to return across the USA.

This week we see ongoing rapid sports game scheduling ushering some smaller cities into the busiest in the USA.

What happens next? 

The pandemic era has been a radical wake up call for every business. Most were relying on historical demand data only, but 2020 didn’t look anything like 2019. This year is far more optimistic and promising, but 2021 is a unique year also.

Our data quality and data science teams have been tracking how restrictions easing impact both the volume of events as well as the predicted attendance. Because of this research, we are anticipating a huge surge of large events being booked from June onwards as many states ease all restrictions on events from June and July. 

Make sure you sign up to receive our weekly email versions of this report so your business has the demand intelligence it needs to make the most of the event and economic recovery.

This report outlines the general trajectory and trends of event recovery across the United States. To make the most of events in your forecasting, you will need to use programmatic solutions given what dynamic and large datasets event data can be. 

PredictHQ is supplying our customers with impactful events across the world, both verified and standardized, from 19 categories in one API. 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.