Phone-Free Events Are Trending. Here Are Big Reasons Behind This

InnovationHealthcarePhone-Free Events Are Trending. Here Are Big Reasons Behind ThisByBruce Y. Lee,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Bruce Y. Lee, M.D., MBA, covers health, medicine, wellness and scienceFollow AuthorJun 08, 2026, 09:56am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.More and more events are having attendees turn over their phones before entering the venues. (Photo: Getty)gettyYou could say that there’s been pretty good reception for phone-free events over the past two years. In fact, data from Eventbrite, a ticketing and event management platform. even showed a 567 percent increase in such events around the world from 2024 to 2025. And, yes, there was a 6-7 in there. But this phone-free trend has been far from non-sensical and actually seems to be a dialing back of some other trends that have been going on for well over a decade. To get the 4-1-1 on phone-free events I talked to Mika Itkin-Weinstein, director of event marketing for Elsewhere, a Brooklyn, NYC-based music venue and nightclub that has been holding such events, and attended some phone-free events myself without, of course, my phone. Phone-Free Events Aren’t New But Have Been On The RiseThere are different degrees to which an event can go cell phone-free. The “soft-cell” one is to place stickers over guests’ cameras to keep them from photoing or videoing the event. A more stringent approach is to tell guests to keep it in their pants—meaning their phone—throughout the event. The strictest end of the phone-free spectrum is to confiscate all phones at the door.Regardless, don’t try to sell this cell phone-free thing as a completely new idea. As Itkin-Weinstein emphasized to me, “There are a lot of great spaces in New York and like in Berlin that have always had policies like this.” What’s new is the rise in popularity of such events. Eventbrite data showed that...