The Hallway Was the Meeting

Cedar Valley News
May 14, 2026
The Hallway Was the Meeting
By Chloe Papadakis

The Riverside Inn has not been full on a weekend in three years.

I walked past it Tuesday on my way home. Twenty-two of the thirty-six rooms had their curtains open and their lights off. The marquee read Welcome State Library Association, the way it has read for some version of an association every May for as long as I can remember. The lot held eight cars.

I asked the woman behind the front desk what was happening. She told me the State Library Association had moved to virtual this year. The Methodist district conference had moved to virtual the year before. The regional teachers’ meeting had skipped two years running. The hotel let go of two front-desk staff members in February. She did not say it the way people say things when they want you to feel bad for them. She said it the way you say a fact you have been carrying around for a while.

I have been thinking about her ever since.

The numbers are on the record. The Oxford Economics and Events Industry Council Global Business Events Barometer reports that attendance at U.S. business events is still down about 6% from 2019. Real revenue, after inflation, is down by more than 10%. Six years after the pandemic, the meeting and convention industry has not come back.

Just twenty-three percent of planners anticipate more meetings in 2026 than in 2025, the lowest figure in three years. Forty percent expect attendance to decline ten percent or more. The Global Business Travel Association reports 56% of organizations have changed their meeting strategy in the past three months. A quarter canceled meetings outright.

The trade press knows this. The Riverside Inn knows this. Most of you may not.

I am twenty-eight years old. I am exactly the cohort the Meetings Today survey names as part of the problem — younger generations’ reduced interest, increased virtual alternatives, and attendance drops. I have sat in a Zoom call where an email would have done. I have been in the breakout room with three people staring at a presentation nobody had read. I know why we stopped going.

But I want to name what we did not realize we were giving up.

The hallway was the meeting.

The conference was always two things. The thing on the program. The thing not on the program — the hallway between. The conversation at the coffee station. The drink at the bar at six fifteen with a person you had been emailing for two years and never met. The walk to lunch with the woman three departments over, who turned out to be the person you needed to know. The breakfast where someone older than you said the one sentence about your career you had been waiting your whole career to hear from someone other than yourself.

None of it happened on Zoom. We told ourselves the panel was the conference. The panel was never the conference. The panel was the excuse for the conference.

A whole generation of people my age and younger has only known the panel. We do not know what is missing because we have never had it. We are choosing, rationally, not to fly across the country for something we have been told is the same as a laptop. We are not wrong about the panel. We are wrong about everything around the panel, because nobody has shown us what the everything was.

Meanwhile, the Riverside Inn has eight cars in its lot on a Tuesday in May.

This is not only about hotels. The convention center on Highway 14 has half the bookings it had ten years ago. The state association used to bring three hundred people through here in May. It has brought zero in five.

There is something I want to say to people my age. The hallway is real. If you have a chance to go to a real conference this year, go. Not for the panel. For the hallway.

There is something I want to say to people my parents’ age. Tell us what we are missing. We will listen. We have not been told.

Tell us on the Facebook page what you remember about the hallway.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. The hallway stories are welcome too — the conference, the year, the person you met, the conversation you have not forgotten. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the Oxford Economics and Events Industry Council Global Business Events Barometer, the Northstar Meetings Group and Cvent PULSE planner survey, the Global Business Travel Association April 2026 figures, and the Meetings Today survey findings are real.

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