ISSN: 2225-8329
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The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the global business events industry, including Malaysia’s thriving sector. This paper aims to explore the post-pandemic impact on the Malaysian business events industry. A qualitative methodology was adopted to collect primary data from semi-structured interviews to explore the post-pandemic impacts on the Malaysian business events industry, which focuses on the recovery strategies and challenges. The informants included ten industry experts from the Malaysian business events industry. The data collected were then grouped using ATLAS. ti (v.23) software for thematic analysis. Trustworthiness assessment was applied to ensure the rigour and increase the qualitative findings' credibility. The qualitative findings revealed the following final themes: hybrid event adoption, reduced international participation and financial constraints. This study zoomed in on the Malaysian business events and focused only on findings from the business event industry expert’s perspective. In the future, further exploration may focus on other business event industry stakeholders such as destination marketing companies, airline operators, travel intermediaries, clients, suppliers, universities and the government. This qualitative research study will shed light on future research covering the newly identified inductive themes and offer holistic recommendations to better position Malaysia as a preferred business events destination post-pandemic COVID-19. Also, this study provides recommendations for the resilience and sustainable growth of the business events industry in a post-pandemic landscape. This is the first such study to date, which has never been explored in qualitative academic research. Thus, this study has substantial implications for various business events industry stakeholders in Malaysia.
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