Corporate Incentive Travel on the Up

After a couple of years in the doldrums, indications are Incentive Travel has started to perk up. Having been hamstrung by a combination of difficulties with a fragile economy and fear over perceptions, corporates have given employee motivational reward travel a wide berth. You may say arguably so, much to the chagrin of agencies like ourselves.

We, like the rest of the event industry, saw spend fall off a cliff. But it is slowly coming back. We’ve already have as many travel projects book in Q1 this year as took place in the whole of 2010. So we asked ourselves why?

2009 and 2010 didn’t see a total cull of sales incentives. A significant reduction, yes, but it was the ‘reward’ and not the schemes themselves that changed dramatically. The desire to drive business performance hard during a recessionary period remained strong, and the wisest companies appreciated the need to invest carefully in well constructed sales incentive programmes rather than simply rely on staff being content with just keeping a job. Vouchers and merchandise, often at significantly lower value than the premium travel prizes, took a front seat. More effort into the communications to drive behaviour became pivotal in delivering ROI.

So why a return to travel? Ultimately, we’re emotional folk – driven by our needs, desires, dreams, ambitions. When we’re calmly instructed to lie down, take a deep breath, relax and wander off into a dreamy state of contentment (yes, there is a direct reference to a personal therapy experience, but I assure you it had no relation to my own state of mind!), it is often to a place with sun, sea and sand.

We dream about exotic locations and absorbing different experiences; travel broadens the mind; legendary stories are born out of ‘tours abroad’; teams are built when they do something different, somewhere different…and there’s the ‘why’.