Corporate Group Incentive Travel Programs

Group Incentive Travel Rewards

What is a group incentive travel program?

A group incentive travel program is a way to reward employees for their work and commitment to the company.

It can be used as a tool to motivate your team, increase productivity, or simply recognize outstanding performance.  They can be used as employee rewards, recognition events, team bonding events, a venue to rub elbows with other top performers and the executive team, and for personal and professional development.

Group incentive travel programs enable you to offer unique, once-in-a-lifetime experiences that the recipients will remember -- and they will share their experiences with their friends and family, which creates brand loyalty.

There are many options for incentive trips including all inclusive resorts, cruises, city hotels, unique accommodation like luxury tents on a safari, luxury train travel, etc. The important consideration is to match the experience with the audience and to create exceptional experiences and special events that the participants cannot easily organize or do on their own.

Benefits of corporate group incentive travel

The benefits of using a corporate incentive travel program are endless. If you’re looking for ways to improve employee morale, boost productivity, meet or exceed your sales goal, as an employee retention tool, or just say thank you, then consider implementing an incentive travel program in your business.

1. Employee Recognition - Reward your best performers with a trip that will make them feel special.
2. Team building - A great way to bring your team together and build their camaraderie. Encouraging employees to take advantage of the incentive travel opportunities will also help them make valuable contacts within their industry and within their company.
3. Motivation - When people know they’ll receive recognition for a job well done, it motivates them to do even better next time around.
4. Productivity - Employees who have been recognized for a job well done are more likely to perform at a higher level than those who haven’t received any kind of recognition.
5. Increased Morale - People love to be appreciated. And when they know they’ve been recognized for something important, they’re much more likely to perform at their best.
6. Cost Savings - By rewarding your top performers in a group environment, you can offer more value at less cost than booking as an individual.
7. Increased Sales & Retention - The more satisfied your customers are, the longer they stay with you.
8. Better Customer Service - When your staff knows they’ve been rewarded for a job well done by being taken out of the office, they’re more likely to go above and beyond for your customers.
9. Improved Reputation - Your company will look good if its employees are treated well.
10. Stronger Company Culture - When you reward your employees, you create a culture where everyone feels valued.

How to implement an incentive travel program:

Identify WHY you are sponsoring a group incentive travel program.

What are you aiming to achieve? How does this fit into your organization's overall vision, and more specifically, its strategic objectives and business goals?

WHO are you going to include in the incentive travel program?

Once you know your WHY, WHO are the people that will be invited to participate in the program?  For example, if it is an incentive program to increase sales, are you inviting your internal sales team, your channel partners/resellers, a subset of either, or both?

Remember that your top producing sales performers will likely be the top producers in an incentive travel program, and you definitely want to keep encouraging them to be top producers.  However, the middle 60% of producers have the potential to move the needle farther and give you better results if you include them.

WHAT are you going to encourage?

This is an area where decisions can make or break the program. You need to align your program with your objectives, core values, and other strategic initiatives as a starting point.

Then you need to work with other departments to ensure that they can support your program.  For example, if you sponsor a sales incentive, do you have enough inventory to support the program?  Is the cash flow situation healthy enough to pay for the inventory? Are there enough support people to handle the increase in sales? 

A sales incentive can be an incredible tool to increase bottom-line profit but it can also backfire miserably if it's not thought through and communication with other departments isn't initiated.

WHAT are you going to offer as a reward?

Since this page is focusing on group incentive travel, the assumption is that you are going to offer a travel reward for a group of people.

Where would you like to go? Are you planning a domestic trip, an international trip relatively close by, or a long-haul trip? The travel options are enormous and you should consider what type of trip best fits your needs.

Who will be invited (the qualifiers, or the qualifiers and a +1, or the qualifiers and their family?)

How long will the trip be?  Factor in travel time (at least 1 day of travel each way).

What type of experience will you offer? Cultural trip? Adventure trip? Luxurious trip? Golf or spa trip? Total relaxation trip? 

Will you have a fully structured itinerary, or a flexible itinerary (perhaps meeting only for dinner and/or a gala event)?

What unforgettable experiences can you offer? One of the benefits of incentive travel is that you can offer the once in a lifetime experience which creates an emotional bond with your organization. Memorable experiences and special events make group incentive trips fantastic motivational tools.  

Define your budget

Your incentive program should be self-liquidating and provide additional return on investment, so when you are defining your budget you should start with an understanding of what your baseline numbers are.  What are your projected sales without the incentive program? What is your profit margin?  What is your anticipated increase (worst case, most likely, and hit-it-out-of-the-park scenarios)? How much of the increase will you allocate to fund the program (warning: too little and your participants could decide it's not worth it and too much and your ROI won't be as great as it could be.  It's a fine balance.)

There are many other variables to consider, which will be addressed in our blog and in our training but these are the absolute bare minimum questions to answer.

You'll likely have to prove your business case to get approval and you'll likely have to do a post-mortem analysis about what went right and what could have been better, so approach your program with the level of detail that would be required for a capital expense project (even though it's not but it will ensure you don't miss anything and your CFO will be happy.)

Is your budget enough?  

Is it enough to do what you envision?  Is it enough to get buy-in from your participants? Again, they will judge the effort required against the reward offered and if it's not worth it, they won't comply.  

The more experienced your audience is with incentives, the more they will expect - the bar will continue to rise, so this is where an incentive company can help you to be creative and offer unique experiences.

Remember to budget for marketing and administration and unexpected expenses (such as inflation or rising travel costs.)

Define the program structure

How long is the qualification period?

What specifically are you incentivizing - is it new clients, overall sales, sales of a specific product, etc.? 

What are the achievable goals you wish to encourage? The goals should be a bit of a stretch but they must be attainable, otherwise, your participants won't even bother.

Are you going to offer a fast-start promotion to get the momentum going? Will you add other promotions throughout the campaign?

Is the program going to be open-ended - anyone who reaches their target qualifies? Or is it going to be close-ended - only a certain number of people will qualify and it's a race to the finish.  The open-ended programs are more attractive to participants as they are competing against themselves rather than competing against the top performers who always qualify.

If you structure your program properly and you have more qualifiers than you expect, it's actually a good thing because it means that you've exceeded your targets. You'll just have to ensure that your meeting planners can get the additional rooms needed and the event spaces can accommodate the additional qualifiers.

Set your rules

You know your budget and you know what you intend to achieve, so how are you going to make your program come to life?

If you've sponsored other incentive programs, you'll know how important it is to be very specific -- what is allowed, what isn't allowed? Refer to your objectives, the feedback from other department heads and people likely to be affected, the vision and higher purpose of the organization, and your core values.  Use these as your building blocks.

Create your rules, then get feedback from critical thinkers and strategists who can see loopholes that may be exploited.

Conduct a pre-mortem - what could possibly go wrong? What haven't you considered? Resolve those issues then run the program and especially your rules past your legal counsel.

Now for the fun part

With the foundation set, now the incentive trip planning can start. 

This is where the destination, the accommodation, the program, and all the travel logistics come to life.

This is where things start to get exciting for you, the incentive sponsor, especially when someone else (the incentive company) is doing the planning and negotiation for you.

Formulate your marketing plan

Many programs fail because the marketing and communication don't attract and retain the participants' attention.

If you treat your marcom like a new product launch, with all that goes into a new product launch, then you'll have greater success, assuming that the program itself is attractive to the audience.

Launch your program

With the approvals in place, the marketing plan in place, the back-end administration and technology set-up, and the negotiations finalized, it's time for your kick-off.

Analyze and adjust

Throughout your program, you'll find that you'll need to tweak certain elements (which should be covered in the official program rules).  Perhaps a new competitor has entered the market, making things harder for your sales team, or perhaps a competitor exited the market (what is your stance on "gimme sales" - sales that fall into your lap because of their exit?), of perhaps there are travel restrictions, or a pandemic, or a war, or a supply chain issue that changed during the program,  etc. How will you adjust the program to keep the momentum going and your audience engaged?

Your incentive company should be able to guide you as they are experts in unexpected events.

Celebrate success

Celebrate regularly throughout the program, to keep your participants engaged.

And of course, celebrate the qualifiers with an experience that exceeds their expectations.

Deliver the reward

Everyone has worked toward the reward, the expectation of receiving the experience the promises made.

The last thing anyone wants is to receive something less than promised.

Make sure that you deliver the best possible experience and work with your incentive travel planners to iron out any kinks that arise. 

Air travel these days is an experience unto itself -- and not nearly as enjoyable as it once was -- with ever-changing restrictions, in-flight experiences lacking, and flights changing numerous times.  And while your travel planner cannot control everything, they can anticipate what could happen and have contingencies in place.

But once everyone arrives safely at their destination, it's time for your travel professional to coordinate with the destination management company, event professionals, transportation companies, hotel staff, and all of the other suppliers to deliver everything exceptionally well and make the effort (and the transportation) all worthwhile. The ultimate goal is for the qualifiers to say "that was an amazing trip".

Do your post mortem

What went well? What could have been better? Did you achieve your objectives? What feedback did you receive? What was the ROI?

Use all of this information to start planning your next travel incentive program.