Update on 2020 Conferences

The COVID-19 virus has become a pandemic since we last posted in late February.

Plans for Upcoming Conferences

We will analyze each conference case-by-case to determine three things: 1) Will we be legally allowed to run the event based on state, county, and city regulations. 2) Do we believe we can run the conference safely. 3) Do our attendees, speakers, and sponsors wish to attend given the changed circumstances.

• We were lucky to have been able to run two of our five annual conference before the pandemic hit. The Beer Marketing & Tourism Conference and the Wine Marketing & Tourism Conference are now planned for 2021.
• The International Food Blogger Conference is scheduled for November. We are monitoring the situation weekly but the conference is still scheduled as planned.
• The Beer Now Conference is still scheduled for August in Austin, Texas. It is likely that the state of Texas and city of Austin will allow us to run this event. In addition, we believe that with the smaller size of this conference, we can make adjustments to our plans to dramatically increase safety.
• The Wine Media Conference is a different story. With a group size of approximately 220 attendees and with six multi-day excursions planned throughout Oregon, we did not believe we could run this event safely in 2020. The WMC has been postponed to August of 2021.

Safety Procedures

We expect the COVID-19 virus to be around and impacting society for long enough that we will be running conferences while still under the threat of the virus. As such, we have prepared a Safety Procedures page to explain how we plan to keep you safe during our events.