Designing connections that outlast the event

The lunch queue at the Resto 2026 competition in Mikkeli moved slowly. Students from eight universities of applied sciences stood in line, trays in hand, phones out. The majority were talking to their own teammates. A few exchanged polite nods with competitors from other institutions. By the time the plates were cleared, those brief encounters had already evaporated. No names exchanged. No conversations that might lead somewhere six months later.

This is a pattern familiar to anyone who has attended a hospitality education competition. The event is designed around scoring: task performance, jury evaluation, ranking. Networking, if it happens at all, is a byproduct of proximity. You happen to sit next to someone during a seminar. You share a bus to the venue. These moments carry potential, but potential without structure tends to dissipate.

Sonawane (2024) argues that the gap between hospitality education and industry practice remains wide, partly because the formats through which students, educators and professionals meet have not kept pace with the industry itself.

What experience design knows

In hospitality, we teach students to map guest journeys. Every touchpoint matters: the moment before arrival, the first impression, the interactions during the stay, the feeling that lingers after checkout. Event attendee journey mapping, a method for plotting every participant touchpoint from first invitation through post-event follow-up (Sweap 2024), applies the same logic to event design.

Competitions could borrow this thinking. What if organizers treated participants the way a well-run hotel treats its guests? Pre-arrival introductions between teams from different institutions. Mixed seating at meals, assigned by interest or career goal. Post-competition invitations to a shared space where three days of connection have somewhere to grow.

The data supports this instinct. Freeman’s 2025 networking trends report found that 51 % of attendees say effective networking alone is reason enough to return to an event, and that networking motivation among attendees rose from 39 % in 2021 to 58 % in 2024. Bizzabo’s 2026 event marketing benchmarks tell the other side of the story: only 15 % of organizers rate their networking experiences as truly effective. What attendees value most is precisely what most events deliver least.

From accidental to intentional

Against the above, a few concrete possibilities for creating connections come to mind.

• Sharing participant profiles a couple of weeks before the event so teams can spot peers with shared interests and arrive already primed for conversation.
• Building a 45-minute structured session into the programme where mixed groups tackle a low-stakes micro-challenge together, something substantive enough to create a shared experience but relaxed enough to invite genuine dialogue.
• After the competition, following up with each participant by sending a curated list of five people they interacted with, along with a prompt to continue one conversation.

These are small design choices, practical and inexpensive. What they require is intentionality, a willingness to see the event as an encounter worth shaping, not just a scoring exercise.

The compound effect

Accordingly, the wider picture deserves attention. Hospitality competitions already do something valuable as they test whether students can perform under pressure, collaborate, and deliver quality in real time. A companion entry in this series examines what Resto 2026 revealed about the gap between online learning and live competence. This article asks a different question. Once we gather 200 hospitality students in one place for three days, are we making the most of the human capital in the room?

The connections formed during competitions could become professional relationships that last years. A teammate from a rival institution might become a future colleague, a business partner, a research collaborator. Those relationships start with a conversation, and conversations need space, structure and a small push.

The scoreboard will be forgotten by summer. The person you met in the lunch queue might not be.

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