Since mid-March, many of you have been busy closing your fitness facilities, moving to online offerings, dealing with furloughing issues—and if you were furloughed, dealing with getting into your state unemployment queue. Some of you then worked on how to reopen and then did reopen while others of you are still in the planning stages while you wait for your states to allow you to open your doors once again.
Club Industry has been trying to keep you apprised as best we can of COVID-19 news that affects the fitness industry as well as other news during this time. But even though we haven’t been marketing it out of respect for your delicate situations, we also have been working on the 2020 Club Industry Show.
Our speakers should be receiving notifications of their acceptance this week and next, so we can start sharing with you the great conference program topics we have set for the show Oct. 14-16 in St. Louis, Missouri. (Yes, in case you didn’t hear, we announced last year that we’re moving to St. Louis for 2020. The venue is the beautiful St. Louis Union Station Hotel.)
Our track chairs have helped us plan fantastic sessions with quality speakers in our Leadership and Management track (developed by Bill McBride of Active Wellness), Customer Experience and Retention track (developed by Chris Stevenson of Stevenson Consulting), Sales and Marketing track (developed by Marisa Hoff of Stevenson Consulting), Training track (developed by Matt Wright of City Fitness), Programming track (developed by Dori Nugent of xxxx) and Technology and Trends track (developed by Pamela Kufahl of Club Industry).
In addition, we’ll be hosting our second Healthcare & Fitness Integration Summit (developed by Kevin Steele, industry consultant, and Dr. Mark Tager of Changewell), an event that gets together the fitness and the healthcare community to exchange ideas about how to work together to improve the health of the country as well as increase revenue for groups.
Our company, Questex, which owns many conferences and trade shows in a variety of markets, has been creating a plan of action on how to operate in a COVID-19 world. And our operations team is keeping in touch with the St. Louis Union Station Hotel staff about cleaning/disinfecting and distancing protocols that likely will still be in place this October.
We want to assure you that our plans right now are to hold an in-person event, but if something changes, we do have an online event option that we can move to that will be especially beneficial for the conference program.
We also want to ensure you that your safety and ours is of utmost importance to us, and we will comply with any venue, city, state and federal guidelines in place in October.
But we also know that the fitness industry is all about connections and learning from each other, which is why we want you to stay safe now, help to keep your communities safe by reopening with top-level cleaning/disinfecting and distancing protocols in place, so we can all come together in October.
Stay tuned on our website or the www.clubindustryshow.com website for any updates.