Steady as She Goes — For Now

EXHIBITOR's 14th Annual Economic Outlook Survey finds an industry navigating serious headwinds with something between confidence and gritted teeth. By Travis Stanton

Here's a sentence you don't hear often enough in this industry: things are fine. Not great, not terrible. Fine. And right now, given the economic uncertainty, the visa-restriction drama, and the perpetual chorus of "do more with less" echoing off convention hall walls from Vegas to Orlando, fine is a result worth celebrating.

Fine, more or less, is what EXHIBITOR's 2026 Economic Outlook Survey found based on responses from nearly 200 trade show and event professionals. But the longer answer is considerably more interesting — depending on which set of data you're looking at.

The Confidence Quotient

Eighty percent of respondents are confident or extremely confident their 2026 exhibit-marketing programs will outperform their 2025 KPIs. Eighty percent. Amid an economic narrative that reads like a thriller novel, four out of five exhibit managers looked toward the horizon and said they expect to land somewhere better than where they started.

That number isn't wishful thinking. It's institutional memory. Exhibit managers have survived recessions, a global pandemic, a decade of drayage inflation, and a seemingly endless series of people predicting that virtual events would make the show floor obsolete. They're still here. Their confidence is earned.

But there’s a caveat. While not unremarkable, the 80-percent confidence rate isn’t exactly unexpected either, as the metric tends to hover in that range historically, at least in the context of this survey. In other words, optimistic beliefs in marketers’ abilities to weather the storm are kind of baked in. Whether those outlooks prove accurate, however, remains to be seen.

Plus, there’s an obvious issue with using confidence as a predictive measure: It doesn't pay invoices. It’s also important to note that the survey these findings are based on was conducted in early Q1 of 2026. Considering all that has happened in the past three months with regard to everything from the housing market to the Strait of Hormuz, it’s safe to assume the data may have shifted, at least marginally.

Forty percent of respondents said their company's 2026 exhibit-marketing investment will remain the same as it was in 2025. Not grow. Not shrink. Stay put. Add the 20 percent whose budgets increased and the 21 percent whose budgets were cut, and what you get is an industry that is, in aggregate, flat. And when costs are rising — which they are, reliably, year over year — holding position is actually a slow retreat.

What About Budgets?

The survey paints a fairly clear picture of the financial landscape. Forty-one percent of respondents are operating on total 2026 trade show budgets under $500,000. Another 20 percent sit in the $500K to $1 million band. Eleven percent are between $1 million and $2 million, and 16 percent are north of $2 million. Twelve percent reported being unsure of their budget — which, frankly, is its own kind of data point. If you don't know how much you have to spend, the conversation about whether you're spending it wisely probably hasn't happened yet.

For the roughly one in five who saw their budgets grow, the priorities were clear: exhibit at more shows, increase the booth size, and invest in new exhibit properties or components. These are the programs playing offense. They're betting that competitive presence while others pull back is worth the cost.

For the slightly larger one in five who took a hit, the playbook ran in the other direction. First casualty: staff. Fewer people traveling to shows. Second: booth size, reduced. Third: the show list itself, trimmed. These are rational, understandable decisions. They are also, if the attendee quality data from recent years is any indication, decisions that compound the problem they're trying to solve. You can't capture leads from a show you didn't attend. And you can't win with a skeleton crew against a competitor who showed up with a full team of people who know the product and are ready to work that window of opportunity.

Inflation Isn’t Invisible

The most useful data in this survey — the kind that should actually change how you plan your 2026 program — is buried in the spending-by-category breakdown. Here's what it shows: Sixty-seven percent of respondents are maintaining their shipping budgets, with 15 percent increasing. Makes sense. You can negotiate many things in this industry, but the cost of getting your booth from point A to point B is not typically among them.

Show services expenditures are being maintained by 69 percent, with only 8 percent increasing and 18 percent cutting. Given that show services are consistently the category exhibitors complain about most — a category where prices rarely decrease and vendor options are often limited by exclusivity — this particular number suggests not contentment but resignation. People aren't happy with what show services cost. They're just not seeing a way around it.

But as both shipping- and show service-related costs increase, merely maintaining spending isn’t realistic if you plan to exhibit with the same properties and impact. It’s the reality Americans are facing from the gas pump to the grocery store. You can spend the same amount of money on food and fuel, but without accounting for increased costs, that’s going to mean sacrificing quantity or quality (or both).

Take shipping. The only way to truly maintain spending is to ship less often, pack freight more efficiently, or minimize return trips. You can’t send the same things to the same places for the same price unless you’re Houdini. In other words, standing still actually requires a few steps back.

It’s akin to saying you’re going to spend the same amount on this year’s summer vacation despite increasing rates for everything from the aforementioned line items (food and fuel) to airfare and hotels. Yes, it’s possible, but not without making some sacrifices and concessions.

Speaking of travel and lodging, that line item is being hit the hardest, with 32 percent of respondents planning to decrease spending there. This is the staffing reduction story expressed in hotel room nights and airline tickets. It's also the story that show organizers and the convention cities hosting these shows may want to read carefully, because fewer exhibit staff means fewer room nights, fewer flights booked, fewer cab rides. For show organizers, that means more attrition.

Meanwhile, spending on exhibit promotions is down for 28 percent of respondents — and this one is genuinely perplexing. Pre-show and at-show marketing is how you drive booth traffic. It's the investment that turns floor space into conversations and conversations into opportunities. Cutting promotions while maintaining your space commitment is the exhibit industry equivalent of buying a boat, loading it with the best fishing gear money can buy, and then refusing to spend money on bait.

One Survey, Two Realities

The sentiment data is where this survey gets genuinely fascinating, because it reveals something that most industry research papers over: Exhibit and event professionals appear to live in two completely different realities simultaneously, and they've found a way to be entirely rational about both of them.

On trade shows as a marketing medium: 91 percent optimistic or hopeful. On their own career trajectory: 84 percent positive. These are strong numbers, and they reflect something real about the people who choose this work and stay in it. They believe in what they do. The data, year after year, tends to validate that belief. Then the bottom falls out.

On the economy: only 34 percent are optimistic or hopeful. Forty-eight percent are cautious. Eighteen percent are pessimistic. The floor doesn't just drop — it disappears.

What this tells you is that exhibit managers have, with impressive precision, separated their belief in the channel from their belief in the conditions surrounding it. They are not naive about the world. Tariff whiplash, visa restrictions that prevent the right people from attending the right events, customer belt-tightening and bandwidth issues that keep decision-makers in their offices instead of on show floors — they see all of it clearly and report it accurately. They just refuse to let it change their fundamental assessment of what face-to-face marketing can accomplish when it's done well. Whether that's wisdom or stubbornness probably depends on what happens to the economy over the next 18 months.

Steady as She Goes

The captain-in-a-storm metaphor employed by Exhibitor to accompany this story is fitting. There's something genuinely admirable about an industry that looks at visa restrictions, economic uncertainty, shrinking budgets, and rising costs and responds with: We're going to hold our position and come out better on the other side.

But the metaphor cuts both ways. A good captain in a storm doesn't just grip the wheel. They trim the sails. They think about which ports of call are worth the fuel in uncertain conditions and which ones aren't. In fact, when the storm hits they start doing more, not less.

Similarly, the programs that will look back on 2026 as a year they gained ground while others held position or receded are already doing the things the data points toward: maintaining promotional spending even when it's tempting to cut, maximizing your available budget in order to maintain mindshare and market share, and keeping staffing levels that let them actually work the room instead of just physically occupy it. These are not exotic strategies. They are the decisions that separate the exhibitors the attendee remembers from the ones who were just there.

It bears repeating: Eighty percent of this industry expects to do better in 2026 than they did in 2025. And I suspect they will. But it won’t be because they put their programs on rinse-and-repeat, and it won’t be because they started arbitrarily slashing line items. Instead, it will be the result of strategic decisions, data-backed bets, and the mindfulness to balance today’s reality with more long-term objectives.

Data from EXHIBITOR Magazine's 14th Annual Economic Outlook Survey of nearly 200 trade show and events professionals.