When the pandemic forced every conference online in 2020, many predicted a permanent transformation: travel would become rare, virtual would become the default, and the carbon cost of flying thousands of researchers around the world for a three-day meeting would finally be reckoned with. Five years later, the picture is more complicated than either enthusiasts or sceptics predicted.
What Actually Happened: The Data
In-person attendance at major conferences has recovered substantially since 2022, but it has not returned to 2019 levels at most events. The pattern varies significantly by field:
- In AI and CS, major conferences like NeurIPS and CVPR have returned to and in some cases exceeded pre-pandemic in-person numbers — but now alongside a large virtual attendee base that did not exist before 2020
- In humanities and social sciences, many events have settled into a stable hybrid format where roughly 40–60% of attendees participate virtually
- In medicine and life sciences, major clinical conferences have largely returned to fully in-person formats, driven by the hands-on and exhibitor-dependent nature of those events
Why In-Person Has Not Disappeared
The factors that sustain in-person attendance are mostly social and psychological rather than informational:
- Serendipitous connections: The researcher you meet waiting for coffee, who turns out to be working on the exact problem you have been stuck on for six months, does not happen virtually. This kind of unstructured encounter is genuinely difficult to replicate in an online format.
- Social proof and visibility: Being physically present at the conference where your paper is presented remains a stronger professional signal than a Zoom presentation. This may be irrational, but it affects career outcomes.
- Fatigue with screens: After years of remote work and virtual events, many researchers actively value the physical break that conference travel provides — the change of context, the enforced focus away from email and routine.
- Junior researcher career development: PhD students and early-career researchers benefit disproportionately from in-person networking. Those who began graduate school during the pandemic and attended only virtual events for 2–3 years consistently reported weaker professional networks than their in-person counterparts.
Why In-Person Is Losing Some Ground
- Cost: A typical European conference trip — flights, hotel, registration — now easily exceeds €2,000. Institutional travel budgets have not kept pace with post-pandemic price increases.
- Carbon consciousness: An increasing number of researchers, particularly in environmental and sustainability fields, are publicly committing to reduced conference travel. Some institutions have formal carbon budgets for staff travel.
- Geographic accessibility: Virtual attendance has made conferences genuinely accessible to researchers in the Global South who could not previously afford or obtain visas for international travel. The loss of this access is a real cost of returning to purely in-person formats.
- Established quality of virtual proceedings: Virtual presentations are now indexed, cited, and career-valuable in exactly the same way as in-person presentations at the same event. The professional output is identical.
The Hybrid Compromise: Not Ideal for Everyone
Hybrid conferences are the current majority format at major international events — but they satisfy neither group completely. In-person attendees sometimes feel the event is designed around the virtual stream (cameras blocking sightlines, sessions interrupted for technical checks). Virtual attendees often feel like second-class participants when Q&A is dominated by the physical room.
The most successful hybrid events invest heavily in a dedicated virtual host, equal Q&A management, and a virtual-only programme element (networking events, workshops, poster sessions) that gives remote attendees something the in-person audience cannot get.
What the Future Probably Looks Like
The most likely trajectory is not a binary choice between in-person and virtual but a stratified system:
- Flagship annual conferences will remain predominantly in-person with a significant hybrid option — because the community-building and prestige functions require physical presence
- Specialised workshops will increasingly go fully virtual or asynchronous, because the audience is global and the content-per-hour ratio matters more than the social dimension
- Regional conferences will compete with each other on accessibility and local networking rather than trying to be global events
In-person academic conferencing is not dying — but the unexamined assumption that it is the only legitimate format for knowledge exchange has died. That, arguably, is progress.