Trump and Uncertainty Made Their Mark on Events in 2025

Much of Skift Meetings’ coverage of 2025 reads almost like a single story — one of the ongoing pressures of planners wrestling with uncertainty while being expected to deliver the same quality meetings and incentive programs as always. 

The tension is palpable throughout our Top 10 Articles of the Year: higher costs but the same budget, a 43-day government shutdown that wreaked havoc and required Plan Bs and Cs, and attendees choosing to stay home rather than cross the U.S. border while the show is forced to go on. 

The list is interspersed with our exclusive reporting of an ongoing scam that has targeted event planners, a speaker training firm scandal, and a story about the other most popular topic of the year, AI.

Here are Skift Meetings' Top 10 Articles of 2025:

1. Meeting Cancellations Mount as Trump Administration Orders Take Effect

Rhode Island saw its first business conference, focused on renewable offshore wind energy, cancel on January 27 — a sign of things to come. As the year churned on, the economic toll increased, exacerbated by a government shutdown from October 1-November 12. The American Hotel & Lodging Association estimated that each day of the shutdown cost the economy approximately $31 million in activity that would have been generated by hotel stays. 

2. Speaker Training Firm Shuts Down, Cites “Serious Financial Irregularities”

There’s always a level of fascination with stories of companies that move from being a hot ticket to shutting down. That was what happened to ImpactEleven, a professional speaking training company founded to support speakers through live events, coaching programs, and creative services, that went from high valuation to collapse. It worked closely with speakers bureaus including BigSpeak, Gotham Artists, and Worldwide Speakers Group.

3. Need Temporary Staff for Meetings? Look No Further

Planners would rather be growing their internal staffs, but adding headcount in tumultuous times is a hard sell. Some companies have turned to temps as a solution. 

4. U.S.-Canada Tariff Fallout Hits Business Events

Throughout the year, all eyes have been on how the Trump administration’s  actions have dealt a strong blow to cross-border business events, including some high-profile cancellations. By the middle of the year, Canada’s meetings industry had grown by 8% from meetings moved across the border, and U.S. meetings business (all travel, for that matter) from Canada eviscerated.

5. Fraudster Scams Event Planner Out of $20K

Skift Meetings’ reporting uncovered a scammer posing as a representative from Glidden Paints, who defrauded a veteran event producer and continues to reach out to event planners using different aliases.

6. Certified Meeting Professional Program Gets Major Update

For the first time since 2017, the Events Industry Council rolled out significant changes to its Certified Meeting Professional International Standards, built on feedback from a whopping 1,000 subject matter experts. 

7. Medical Meetings Canceled Under New Trump Policies

Medical and pharmaceutical meetings have been hard hit by the impact of government layoffs. The National Institutes of Health, the U.S.'s largest research agency, started canceling its meetings at the beginning of the year. Like our other Trump 2.0 articles, the saga is expected to continue into 2026.

8. The Trump 2.0 Effect on Meetings

A challenging landscape of rising costs, declining attendance, and mounting uncertainty was unquestionably the story of 2025 and looks to be the same again in 2026.

9. Sundance Film Festival to Leave Park City After 40 Years, Moving to Boulder in 2027

A stunning example of the economic impact of a single meeting, Park City, Utah will see 72,840 fewer annual attendees and an estimated yearly hit of $132 million in spending when the the Sundance Film Festival moves to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. Here’s the role anti-DEI legislation played in the decision.

10. Planners Share Their Top AI Prompts

The meetings industry couldn’t get enough of the AI prompt conversation in 2025, as this story based on a Backstage Briefing webinar on the topic reveals.