Events Are Quietly Becoming Hospitality’s Most Reliable Source of Hospitality Event Data

By Zenia Pearl V. Nicolas

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For more than a decade, hospitality brands built their customer understanding around digital footprints, page views, retargeting data, and hospitality event data collected from live experiences.

Privacy laws, cookie deprecation, and shifting user behavior have reshaped the landscape. Studies show a clear pattern:

• Many brands are losing access to familiar tracking tools used to read customer behavior (McKinsey & Company, 2021).

• Nearly half of consumers now decline tracking permissions in digital channels (Accenture, 2024).

• People are becoming far more selective about the information they share online (Deloitte Insights, 2023).

With digital signals thinning out, many hospitality groups are directing their attention to something previously treated mainly as a branding play: events.

What Makes Event Data Different

Unlike digital interactions that are often fragmented, incomplete, or influenced by algorithms, events capture behavior in real situations.

Voluntary participation

People choose to attend, initiate conversations, and engage with experiences.A benchmark report showed that over 90% of attendees willingly share information when the value is clear (Freeman, 2019).

Emotion-driven decision-making

Hospitality spending is tied closely to emotion.Research found that emotional motivators influence up to 70% of consumer decisions, especially in travel and experience-led categories (Magids et al., 2015).

Events are one of the few environments where emotional drivers can be observed directly: through the way people move through spaces, respond to presentations, or gravitate toward specific offerings.

Authentic preference signals

Clicks tell you what someone touched. Events tell you what someone cares about.The difference is qualitative, and it reshapes how brands interpret demand.

Context-rich interactions

Event conversations often reveal the “why” behind a decision — curiosity, budget, personal interest, or unmet needs — something web analytics cannot uncover.

Why Hospitality Brands Are Paying Attention

Hotels, resorts, wellness retreats, and tourism brands all operate in highly competitive environments where loyalty is fragile.

Industry research highlights the stakes:

• A majority of travelers are willing to switch brands after just one negative experience (PwC, 2018).

• Most customers expect companies to understand their preferences and personal context (Salesforce, 2024).

  
  

To deliver personalization at this level, brands need more than digital breadcrumbs. They need insights rooted in human behavior, not browser activity.

Events give hospitality executives the closest view of what guests truly value — wellness-driven travel, sustainability, luxury design, food experiences, community, or adventure.

These signals help brands shape offerings, improve guest journeys, and forecast future demand more accurately.

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How rockbird media Approaches Event Intelligence

Within rockbird media’s ecosystem of hospitality, retail, HR and tech events, the goal is not simply to gather people, it’s to understand them.

Several individuals gathered at a table in a conference room, participating in one on one meeting

People attending the one-on-one meeting

A diverse crowd of people sitting at tables in a room, interacting and enjoying a communal atmospher

Our formats are designed to generate:

• High-intent interactions from decision-makers

• Consent-based, high-fidelity first-party data

• Behavioral signals visible only in real-world engagement

• Industry-specific insights from conversations, roundtables, and live sessions

• Contextual understanding that strengthens marketing and product decisions

This blend of human proximity and strategic data collection helps brands move away from assumptions and toward grounded, experience-driven insights.

Hospitality is a people-centered industry. The clearest understanding of guests still emerges from environments where their authentic behavior is visible. Events remain one of the few places where this level of clarity is possible and increasingly, essential.

References

• Accenture. (2024). The empowered consumer.https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/consulting/empowered-consumer

• Deloitte Insights. (2023). TMT predictions 2024.https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/technology-media-and-telecom-predictions/2024.html

• Freeman. (2019). The Freeman® data benchmark study: Executive summary [PDF]. https://www.eventmarketer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/freeman-data-benchmark-study-executive-summary_2019_event-marketer.pdf

• Magids, S., Zorfas, A., & Leemon, D. (2015). The new science of customer emotions. Harvard Business Review.https://hbr.org/2015/11/the-new-science-of-customer-emotions 

• McKinsey & Company. (2021). The demise of third-party cookies and identifiers.https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-demise-of-third-party-cookies-and-identifiers

• PwC. (2018). Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right [PDF].https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/assets/pdf/experience-is-everything.pdf

• Salesforce. (2024). What are customer expectations?https://www.salesforce.com/ap/small-business/what-are-customer-expectations/

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