Hidden Costs to Consider When Planning In-Person Meetings

There are many hidden costs to organizing in-person meetings—and we’re not just talking about financial costs. As an executive assistant (EA) or meeting planner, you know how many details go into organizing an in-person meeting—and how fast things can change. 

In this blog, we’ve identified some of the hidden costs of in-person meetings that sometimes go unnoticed, and ways to factor them into your planning. This will help you to organize meetings that are cost-effective, purposeful, and an enjoyable experience for every attendee.  

The Cost of Making Assumptions

When planning a meeting, there are many important decisions that need to be made that can define the meeting, but also be costly if you choose the wrong option. Finding the best destination to meet is one of the most important ones. Some meetings have a predetermined destination, but with today’s dispersed workforce, it’s not always obvious where to meet. Many companies are fully or partially remote, and team members are located across the country or abroad. 

By relying on assumptions when making decisions about your meeting location and for other important meeting details, you risk accumulating significant costs for you and your company.

Hidden Costs

The most obvious meeting location is not always the right one—or the most cost effective. Many organizations assume the location of their main office must be the best option to save on venue cost or if they have local attendees near the area. Sometimes this is the case, but it’s important to analyze each meeting individually. 

Without comparing different meeting locations, you can end up choosing a location that requires tedious or long travel for attendees, and one that costs more overall when factoring in travel, activity, and accommodation rates in the area. 

Other details can significantly increase the costs of a location, such as the time of year with peak seasons or difficult weather causing travel challenges, or local events happening at the same time that create heavy-traffic periods and higher cost of accommodation due to high demand. 

Solutions

To prevent this, always rely on data when making key decisions, such as choosing the location of the meeting, not on assumptions. Each meeting is unique with its own objective and attendee list, therefore, key decisions for it should be analyzed thoroughly and backed by data. 

Additionally, make sure you are budgeting accurately and well in advance for each meeting. Using data, such as historical data from past meetings or tech-backed estimations, to do so will help you forecast far more accurately and reliably. This will eliminate any big or costly surprises when the meeting occurs.

TROOP TIP: TROOP’s easy-to-use comparison feature compares meeting locations across dozens of data points like cost and travel time. It analyzes flight and accommodation costs for your exact dates and origins per attendee, helping you estimate budgets more accurately. 

The Cost of Time

The planning of and attending of an in-person meeting costs significant time for multiple people involved.

Hidden Costs

In a recent survey, we found that in-person meeting planning takes up 25% of an EA’s time, a considerable investment given the full range of your responsibilities. This includes researching, organizing, and the amount of time taken to reach decisions or get approvals. Having the right resources and data to aid your research and back up your decisions, can save you a lot of time. 

Additionally, with today’s rising prices for travel, attendee travel can be financially costly, but also costs attendee time. The longer it takes for an attendee to reach their destination - with multiple connections and layovers - the more of their time it costs. What’s more, lengthy travel takes your attendees away from their day-to-day and core responsibilities, which can cost your organization even more down the line. 

But the cost of time isn’t just limited to travel to or planning of a meeting. When in-person meetings go off track or lose purpose, all the time spent organizing them and traveling to the session is effectively wasted.

Solutions

To ensure you’re making the most out of your time and boosting productivity, incorporate technology and automation into your planning processes. Doing so will save you valuable time enabling you to focus on other important responsibilities on your plate.

Make the most of the time your attendees have together. Aim to keep every in-person meeting you organize on track so that attendees get the most out of your session and reach set goals and objectives.

TROOP TIP: A tool like TROOP can save you hours of time on research and logistics. Doing the research for you in just minutes, determining ideal destinations and travel logistics for your attendees. TROOP’s analytics arms you with data to arrive at decisions faster, get approvals easier, and can reduce travel time for attendees.

Employee Wellbeing Costs

One of the more important - but sometimes overlooked - costs of in-person meeting planning is that of attendee wellbeing.

Hidden Costs

Every in-person meeting, especially those that require significant travel, takes time away from your attendee’s day-to-day workload, but also from their personal lives and families. Additionally, long travel times can exhaust attendees, making them less present or effective when in-session.

Meeting overload is a significant problem, especially, for those who are frequently required to travel for meetings. It can result in burnout, poor company culture, and in some cases, even resignations.  

Solutions

To combat this, you need to make sure that you have the right people in the room, and that every meeting you organize is necessary, purposeful, and seamlessly executed. A great way to bring purpose to your in-person meetings is by defining a clear objective. By defining and communicating your meeting objective effectively and in good time, you encourage better attendee preparation, participation, and enthusiasm.   

Another great way to improve the wellbeing of your meeting attendees is to create a VIP experience for them, from start to finish. Going the extra mile and adding a touch of surprise and delight helps attendees feel that they’ve made a good investment with their time, as well as company resources.

Environmental Costs

In 2025 and beyond, more and more companies are now prioritizing and publicizing their environmental impact—with many implementing strict targets or goals to hit within certain timeframes.  

Hidden Costs

Corporate travel and in-person meetings can have a big impact on the environment, so it’s crucial that, as a meeting planner, you’re considering this in your planning and using tools that help you calculate or reduce your company’s impact as much as possible. For example, longer or more frequent travel, especially with flights versus trains or cars, often equates to higher CO2 emissions. 

Solutions

Thankfully, there is technology that can help you calculate CO2 emissions based on attendee travel to specific destinations. Use this technology to make informed decisions on whether a meeting needs to occur in-person, determine the necessary attendees, and the best destination to limit carbon emissions as much as possible.

TROOP TIP: TROOP’s Where to Meet helps planners easily and efficiently identify and compare destinations for meetings side-by-side based on CO2 emissions. This allows you to choose everything from flights to accommodations, keeping your company’s environmental targets in mind.  

In Summary

The more strategic, data-driven and proactive you are when planning in-person meetings, the more cost-effective they will be from money, to time, and wellbeing. 

If you’d like to take your in-person meeting planning even further this year, download our guide Mastering Meetups: How to Plan In-Person Meeting Effectively. It’s packed full of the best tips to help make your next meetup the most successful one yet.