Business travel veterans—and potentially business travelers themselves—may not care if they ever get on another Zoom meeting. Zoom definitely does care. It launched Zoom Events in July, a virtual event management platform that leverages the trend toward digital engagement even for in-person events. But the company also seems to recognize that its star is forever hitched to the vicissitudes of business travel and meeting demand. The company in 2021 has made sure that in whatever direction the pandemic or future trends push business travel and meetings, Zoom will be there profiting from it.
With the help of the stalled travel industry, Zoom’s full-year revenue quadrupled in 2020 from 2019. The company used that money in 2021 to make shrewd investment decisions led by CFO Kelly Steckelberg to power some of the biggest travel and meetings moves of the year: Cvent going public via a special purpose acquisition company and American Express Global Business Travel going public through the same mechanism.
For the business travel and meetings industry, Cvent and GBT may have been the headline makers. In the details, however, Zoom was in on the action, making significant investments that positioned the company to reap the rewards of recovery. According to reports in Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, Zoom may have taken up to 10 percent equity in Cvent.
That said, the hybrid meeting experience may be here to stay, so deepening partnerships with the leading desktop video platform is a clean decision for both Cvent and GBT. Despite “Zoom fatigue,” GBT Meetings & Events expects attendance for virtual and hybrid events to increase by 2.8 percent to 3.4 percent in 2022. Asked about whether the company’s push into hybrid events could backfire if participants abandon that experience, Cvent CEO Reggie Aggarwal last month told BTN, “The reality is, that just won’t happen.”
Either way, Zoom wins with its recent investments—since the company didn’t invest in only the virtual aspect of these businesses but in their overall success.