The Road to Recovery

Our team has been anxiously awaiting the day when they could finally get back out to travel and meet clients, selling Nova Scotia and our Halifax Convention Centre as the best place to host a convention in the country.

Our team worked day and night with our local, national and international clients to answer their questions, provide flexible solutions to meet their needs and create amazing event experiences for their delegates. And it paid off!

The future is bright at the Halifax Convention Centre with an incredible mix of events in 2022 and beyond. Thanks to our attaction efforts this past year, this upcoming year we’ll see:

• the busiest summer convention season we’ve ever experienced
• 2 of the largest corporate conventions ever hosted in Halifax
• 10 medical/life sciences conventions
• 120+ total events, 80,000 attendees and $40M+ in direct expenditures

There’s no question meetings and conventions are back and our clients can’t wait to be in Nova Scotia. Through strong client relationships, creative engagement strategies and a focus on the future, by year end our team achieved our booking target.

We even launched a campaign to talk about it! With an exciting list of confirmed events we wanted to let our community know what is on the horizon, so we launched the Look Who’s Coming advertising campaign targeted to our local audience and businesses.

Our business is about people and we know our clients, just like us, have faced many challenges, pressures and unknowns trying to plan events during a pandemic. That’s why we looked for fun, unique ways to stay in touch and remind them that Halifax and our Centre were ready and waiting to host them when the time was right. Answering their questions and showcasing how we’ve safely hosted events was our way of helping put their minds at ease, knowing that our experienced team was on hand and ready to help them plan their events.

Our sales team was thrilled to get back out there for one of the first in-person trade shows of the season, the IMEX Tradeshow and Conference. They packed their bags and headed to IMEX earlier this year to participate in the largest trade show for the meetings and events industry in North America. Next stop was Toronto for the Canadian Meetings + Events Expo, the largest and longest running trade show and conference for meeting and event professionals in Canada. Their hard work paid off as 2022 is poised to be our busiest event year ever!

We’re always stronger when we work together, and that was made clear over the past two years as we worked closely with Discover Halifax and our industry partners on a recovery strategy to ensure events can continue successfully in Nova Scotia for decades to come. Through the establishment of the Events Industry Recovery Taskforce, we worked with our partners to identify key issues, develop strategies to overcome them and most of all, make sure we all stayed connected.

We hosted a series of information sessions throughout the year to make sure everyone had access to the key learnings, including how best to adopt Public Health protocols, while safely hosting events. Together with the Taskforce, we supported many engagement initiatives, including the Patio Lanterns Festival, and confidence building campaigns that reinforced just how important events are for our community and businesses.