The car park verdict
The honest moment arrives about an hour into the drive home, when the conference bag is on the passenger seat and the phone has finally stopped buzzing with session reminders. You feel good. You met some decent people, the keynote had a line you'll repeat in Monday's stand-up, and somewhere in the bag is a vendor's branded water bottle you will never use. So you decide, somewhere around the services, that it was probably worth it.
I call that the Car Park Verdict, and I've reached it myself more times than I'd like to admit: a decision made on mood, with the receipts still in a jacket pocket and nothing written down. The trouble is that a good mood is a terrible accountant. Two days out of a business that runs on your attention is a real cost, and in fifteen years in the channel I've met very few owners who went back afterwards and checked whether the event earned it.
What it actually cost you
Start with the bits that have an invoice attached, because they're the easy part and they're smaller than you think. There's the ticket, the flights or the fuel, and the hotel, which varies more than the ticket does: when we checked Booking.com for the event nights in mid-October, the cheapest room we could find ran from £57 at MSP GLOBAL 2026 (a 16-minute walk from the venue) to £192 at MSPNXT 2026, with ChannelNEXT26 West at £156 (across the water, by SeaBus) and ASCII Edge in San Antonio at £84. Those were the floors on the day, they will have moved since, and your real bill will be higher once you want a room you'd actually sleep in. But even the dear end of that range is small next to the cost nobody writes down.
The big line is your time, and your team's time, priced at what it would have earned had you stayed at your desk. Put a day rate on yourself. If you take a sales lead and a tech, do the same for them, and then add the quiet cost of the day before and the day after when nobody is quite at full speed. Write the total on one line in a spreadsheet before you leave, because it'll be an uncomfortable figure and that discomfort is exactly what makes it useful. (I'd rather you flinch at the number in advance than pretend it away on the M6.)
The trouble is that a good mood is a terrible accountant.
What to count on the way back
Here's where most owners go wrong, because they count what the organiser hands them: badge scans, business cards, a bag of brochures and a list of sessions attended. A card is a promise, and the return only shows up when the promise is kept. So the first thing I'd measure is how many conversations you actually followed up within two days of getting home and got a reply to, and the second is how many of those became a meeting, a quote, a referral or a vendor deal on better terms than you had before.
What the organiser counts
- badge scans
- business cards collected
- sessions attended
- vendors visited
What you should count
- conversations followed up, with a reply
- meetings booked in the fortnight after
- processes you changed because of something you heard
- vendor deals with better terms than before
Then count the ideas you used, because this is the return that pays out quietly for years and never appears on the agenda. Someone three seats along at lunch has already fixed the onboarding mess you've been living with, or has a QBR format that gets clients to actually turn up. If you came home and changed one process because of a corridor conversation, write it down with a rough value against it, even if the value is a guess. Most of the worth of any event I've been to was sitting in the hotel bar, and the stage was the excuse for being in the building.
A sum you can do in the car
The method is deliberately crude, because a crude sum you'll actually do beats an elegant one you won't. Cost on one line, return on the other, and underneath them a sentence on what you'd do differently next time: send the sales lead instead of going yourself, book the £59 room we found for Pax8 Beyond EMEA, half an hour out, rather than the one next to the venue, or skip it altogether. Most owners who try this find the return column is thin the first time. That's useful information. It usually means the follow-up never happened, and the follow-up is where the money is.
If there's an event in your diary this quarter, open a blank spreadsheet this week and fill in the cost column now, while the hotel is still a choice rather than a receipt. Then write the names of the people you want to meet in the next column, and leave the return column empty until the week after you're back. The empty cells will nag at you, which is the point. The Car Park Verdict feels good for about as long as the drive lasts, and the spreadsheet is still there in January when the next invitation arrives.
Where the hotel prices come from: the cheapest Booking.com rate we found for one adult, taxes included, for each event's nights. ChannelCon EMEA was checked on 17 September 2026 and the rest on 14 October 2026. Hotel prices change daily, so treat them as a guide and check before you book.
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