Upcoming events in the USA in 2021: Leading Demand Indicators for June 2
Thousands of large events that were postponed over the last 14 months are being locked in for late 2021 and will drive attendance levels above 2019 (pre-pandemic) in high-impact event categories such as festivals.
These weekly Leading Demand Indicators reports focus on event volume as an indicator of economic recovery and consumer/market confidence. But how many people will attend these events is a big question – and our data is showing there is a huge wave of pent up demand that is about to be released.
In June 2021 alone, events drove more than $1.6 billion in demand impact and the recovery is only just getting started. Let’s explore the second half of the year.
How festivals in 2021 compare to 2019
After a year of upheaval and lockdowns, Americans are getting ready to reconnect at large events. One of the most anticipated event recoveries is festivals, both for the participants and the businesses that serve them. Festivals are one of the most closely watched categories for our customers in the accommodation, airline, travel and quick serve retail spaces.
To understand how festivals are returning, we compared the total amount of people expected to attend festivals across the USA in 2021, and compared that to the same period in 2019.
So far, there are 6866 festivals scheduled across the USA from July to December. Their total predicted attendance is:
87% of festival attendance in the same period in 2019 for the whole USA
201% of festival attendance in the same period in 2019 in the state of Nevada
234% of festival attendance in the same period in 2019 in the state of Texas
And 60% in California compared to the same period in 2019.
The ability to know how many people will be attending events both at aggregate and for every event in PredictHQ’s system is powered by our proprietary machine learning models that predict attendance for attendance-based events. These models are updated regularly as the pandemic restrictions ease and are based on factors including:
Venue capacity
Historical attendance at similar events (we have seven years of historical event data)
Popularity of performers or teams
COVID-19 restrictions such as caps on maximum attendance and spacing restrictions to ensure social distancing
A number of consumer confidence markers
Those 6866 festivals will continue to increase from here. While these vary from a few hundred folks all the way up to hundreds of thousands, festivals need to be factored into your recovery strategies.
The events booked this week by type
While festivals are high impact, they’re not the only impactful event returning quickly. Concerts, sports and performing arts continue to be the most frequently scheduled events across the USA.
The cities booking in the most events
In last week’s report we explored how Los Angeles, New York and Chicago were recovering, and all three cities continue to dominate the busiest cities lists. This week the trend continues.
Welcome back California - the busiest state booking in new events
One notable and welcome change we see in the geographical trends in event scheduling across the USA is proof of the direct relationship between restrictions easing and events (and therefore economic impact) rebounding.
California takes the top spot on our busiest states list in this new insight graph. The state is on track to ease remaining restrictions in just over two weeks, on June 15. We are seeing a surge in events being scheduled for the rest of the year already, with San Francisco and San Diego qualifying into the busiest city lists for the first time since we began publishing these reports in early May.
The Californian state government is also exploring how to enable the return of mega events and vaccinations, with plans to maintain some restrictions such as mandatory vaccinations or negative COVID-19 tests for events of more than 5,000 people.
Are you ready for the event recovery boom?
This year has been hard for demand forecasting teams. No longer can you build workable forecasts on the previous year’s data, and the usefulness of pre-pandemic data is also limited.
With so much changing so rapidly, and especially as we tip into a major boom of events returning across the USA that is likely to continue to soar for months, relying on rolling monthly or even weekly averages will also cause inefficiencies and missed opportunities that could have been prepared for with intelligent event data. The PredictHQ team would love to enable your team to make the most of the event recovery - get in touch with our team to explore a free trial of our demand intelligence data.
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.
