The Global Destination Report Just Confirmed What We’ve Been Measuring All Along

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The evidence gap behind events’ sustainability claims

The Business of Events’ Global Destination Report 2026 paints a sector that has moved past pandemic recovery and into something harder: proving its value on terms beyond delegate counts and room nights (Davies Tanner / SFA Connect, 2026). Buried in the interview findings is a pattern that will be familiar to anyone working in event measurement – destinations believe deeply in the sustainability and legacy case for business events, but almost none can evidence it.

The report is candid about this. Sustainability is described as “the most visible part” of a widening value proposition, with destinations leaning on frameworks like GDS-Index and EarthCheck. Yet one European city representative admitted sustainability “is not yet usually the first thing clients ask for,” and only becomes persuasive “when concrete measures are presented.”

Legacy impact fares worse: interviewees across Europe, Canada and the UK say measuring knowledge-economy or innovation outcomes “takes time, research, and money” that funding models simply don’t prioritise.

The report’s own recommendation – fund “a small number of repeatable impact studies” tied to major events – is effectively a call for exactly the kind of measurement infrastructure event:decision already builds, with Impact: Event reviews.

Connectivity sharpens the point. Air access is now the most consistently cited competitiveness constraint, particularly for Tier-2 destinations, and the report links it directly to sustainability: destinations are starting to treat “access, price, and sustainability not as separate issues, but as linked parts of competitiveness.” Since flights typically dominate an event’s footprint, this is the tension our clients are increasingly navigating in real time – chasing international delegates for economic value while facing growing scrutiny on the emissions that travel represents.

There’s also a resourcing story underneath this. 58% of destinations say their teams are too small, and funding cuts hit sustainability programming, market intelligence and legacy design first – the specialist capabilities hardest to build in-house and easiest to lose when budgets tighten.  We’ve just witnessed this very thing within Visit Britain. That’s a structural argument for bringing in dedicated carbon and impact measurement rather than expecting it to emerge from stretched internal teams.

One caveat worth carrying into any conversation: the report finds economic ROI still dominates as the argument that moves governments, while sustainability and legacy are viewed as “less compelling” at the policy level, even as destinations themselves increasingly believe in them. In practice, that means credible sustainability data currently does more work with organisers and clients than with policymakers – useful context for how we frame the numbers we deliver. This was framed well at The Business of Events Policy Forum in July-26 by the MP Martin Rhodes. Yes, shout about big numbers, but more value comes from the story.

Source: The Business of Events, Global Destination Report 2026, produced by Davies Tanner, researched by SFA Connect.

The Average Event Leaves 100% of Social Value Unclaimed

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| event:decision | June 2026

Here’s a claim that sounds like an exaggeration and isn’t: the average event leaves 100% of its social value unclaimed.

Not uncreated. Unclaimed. The distinction matters, and it’s worth £tens of thousands per event.

Created everywhere, claimed nowhere

Every event you delivered last year generated social value. The relationships built face-to-face – the outcome 70% of the EIC’s own survey respondents named as the hardest thing to replace. The training delivered, the knowledge transferred, the local jobs supported, the spend that landed in the host city’s cafés, crews and communities. That value was real. It happened.

And then it evaporated – at least as far as anyone can prove. No number, no record, no line in the post-event report, no mention in the client’s board paper, no credit in the next pitch. Created in full. Claimed at zero.

We’ve put a number on what that’s worth: events can generate 10–30% of their budget in Social Value. Scale that across the sector’s $1.3 trillion of direct spending and you reach the $260bn blind-spot – value the industry’s own flagship economic study concedes “goes unmeasured, unreported, and therefore undervalued.”

That’s the industry’s loss. Yours is more personal: on a £500k event programme, somewhere between £50k and £150k of demonstrable value you delivered – and never once put on the table.

Why nobody claims it

Three reasons, and none of them is “I can’t be bothered.”

First, the client never asks. No brief has ever opened with “please quantify the social value of our conference.” The demand arrives later, through a different door – a CSRD obligation, a procurement matrix, a sustainability report deadline – by which point the event is over and the value is unrecoverable. You can’t manufacture history at deadline.

Second, the industry doesn’t define success that way. When the EIC survey asked how operators measure event success, all eight available answers were commercial: leads, revenue, awareness, deal size. Not one social metric. If success is defined entirely commercially, nobody is incentivised to claim anything else – even the value they actually created.

Third, until recently, there was no unit of account. Carbon got tCO₂e, and look what happened: measurement, targets, league tables, budgets. Social value had warm anecdotes. You cannot claim what you cannot count.

“The social value was real – the relationships, the skills, the local spend all happened. But unmeasured value is unclaimed value.”

What claiming looks like

This is exactly why we built SaVY — Social Value Yield. It does for social value what tCO₂e did for carbon: converts the social performance of an event into a single financial figure – in £ or as a % of budget — covering your event, your supply chain and your organisation.

Claimed value behaves completely differently from created value. It compounds. It goes in the client’s board paper with your name attached. It answers the procurement question before it’s asked. It turns “we’re committed to making a difference” – a sentence every competitor also owns – into “our last programme for you generated £83,000 in measurable social value,” a sentence only you can say.

And here’s the part agencies consistently miss: when you claim the value, a lot of it stays with you. The client gets the proof; you keep the intelligence – the benchmarks, the year-on-year story, the pitch evidence that wins the next three RFPs.

“We’d been creating social value on every event for years. SaVY was the first time we could put a number on it – and the first time a client put it in their Board Report with our agency name next to it.”

The cheapest value you’ll ever add

Most ways of adding value to an event programme cost money: better venues, bigger production, more content. Claiming social value is the rare exception – the value already exists, because you already created it. The only thing missing is the measurement.

One hundred percent unclaimed is the current industry average. It’s also the easiest number in events to improve on.

Put a number on your next event’s social value — talk to us about SaVY and Impact: Event at hello@eventdecision.com