Design of incentive trips

To the outsider, they may look like extravagant up-market holidays, but behind the fun and joviality of most incentive trips lies a lengthy period of detailed planning and designing of the travel award in order to ensure that rhe company's objectives are met to the full.

The principal difference between incentive travel and persona] travel is that, in the former case, a company (i.e. a form of external control) is planning, organising, and promoting the anticipation and fulfilment of the reward experience (Ricci and Holland, 1992). Furthermore, a basic tenet is that incentive trips must consist of experiences that individuals cannot achieve on their own: there is no such thing as an off-the-peg incentive trip, and the skill of the incentive agency lies in ensuring that they design a travel experience which, every time, surprises, delights and impresses the - often very demanding and well-travelled - incentive programme winners.

The characteristic features of incentive trips include the following:

• Uniqueness: no single event should be like any other. Itineraries should not be predictable, but rather, full of surprises and special events. Innovative ideas are the life-blood of this sector, and organisers have to continuously produce creative and original elements to delight participants. The unexpected arrival of the com­pany's managing director by hot-air balloon tor the final evening's gala dinner, for example, would lie a memorable way to conclude an incentive trip.

• Use of fantasy or exotic experiences: incentive trips often include the opportunity for participants to try out novel sporting activities, such as clay-pigeon shooting, falconry or hang-gliding. A skilled incentive travel organiser will be able to include in the programme some activities that the participants will not have already tried but may have always wanted to.

• Exclusivity: at the end of the trip, the participants should have the impression that they have had privileged access to exclusive places and people. If a tourist attraction, such as Madame Tussauds, is visited, then it must be unlike the visits made by the general public; for example, a champagne breakfast held there before opening time, or a behind-the-scenes look at how the wax models are made. Use is often made of celebrities to achieve this effect. For example, guided tours of the destination are all the more memorable if the guide is a well-known actor or sportsperson who happens to live there.

• Activities: few incentive trips leave participants to lie on the beach for days on end. Activities and sports are included as a way of making the trip more memorable and dynamic. Given that award winners are, almost by definition, often competitive by nature, much use is made of competitions and team games, such as beach Olympics, mini-hovercraft races and talent competitions.

Clearly, organising the transport, accommodation, and the entertainment and activities that constitute an incentive trip involves the agency in a vast amount of detailed negotiation and logistical arrangements. Their allies in this task are the same DMCs who assist conference organisers with the details of the ground programme, as described in Chapter 3, These agencies use their local knowledge and contacts to turn the incentive travel agency's ideas into reality.

In the same way as PCOs do, incentive agencies tend to work in partnership with their appointed DMCs, who may be thought of as the creative packager of the travel experience as well as being the logistics manager ensuring that all visitor arrangements run smoothly. In the UK and Ireland, DMCs tend to be small companies that specialise in particular inbound country markets. The world of the DMC is a secretive one, as their business contacts are effectively their core asset (O'Brien, 1997b).

Suppliers

Following on from the preceding investigations into the demand for incentive travel and the role of those intermediaries who design and plan incentive programmes, this section explores the supply of incentive travel services.

One distinguishing feature of incentive travel is that unlike, for example, the con­ference or exhibition sectors, there are no specific infrastructural facilities required for destinations active in the incentive market. Nevertheless, in common with the other forms of business travel already covered in this book, incentive travel makes use of the services and facilities of every sector of the tourism industry, including accommodation, transport, tourist attractions, and recreational resources. How-ever, perhaps for more than any other form of business tourism, it is vital for incentive travel suppliers to fulfill the very high expectations of their clients, with faultless standards of service and attention to detail. Clearly, given their use of luxurious, top-of-the-range facilities, incentive travel clients represent a market that offers high rewards to suppliers. But this is on the strict condition that those suppliers consistently produce an impeccable standard of service at every stage. Some examples of the extra effort needed by suppliers to compete favorably in this market are given below.

Hotels

Given incentive travellers' taste for the best in everything, they constitute a lucra­tive market for hotels active in this sector. Many hotels, by their very design, are well suited to responding to the need for,1 fantasy or exotic element in incentive trips. For example, at the Hyatt Regency Waikoloa in Hawaii, guests are trans­ported to their rooms by boat via canals through tropically landscaped grounds.

Many large hotel chains have dedicated incentive departments whose role it is to persuade incentive travel organisers that their hotels have everything that is required to satisfy their clients. But even smaller, independent hotels can also attract this type of business - on the condition that they are prepared to make the extra effort required. In her advice to hoteliers interested in breaking into the incentive market, Briggs (1993; p.28) make the following points:

Don't make the mistake of thinking that all an incentive group needs is high room rates, a box of chocolates and a bottle of ordinary champagne in the rooms. It takes creativity and imagination to justify those rates...Firstly be sure you can deliver the goods and that your staff can be relied upon to offer a high level of service. You will need to develop a range of services and people you can contact to help you provide new experiences for incentive guests. It doesn't have to be a grand fireworks display in the grounds of your nearest stately home. It could equally be talented magicians per­forming at each table or a Body Shop massage/makeover for each guest. If you... leave the actual packaging up to incentive agents and other professional organisers, you still need to develop a list of suggestions and contacts which show that your hotel is the ideal location for an incentive group, to demonstrate that you understand their needs.

However, this is not a market without disavantages for the hotel sector. One particular difficulty is underlined by O'Brien (1997b; p.B-26):

A dilemma facing the F.uropean hotels industry concerns the future for incentive travel rates. With strong demand for hotel rooms from business travellers, hoteliers are trying to maximise revenue yield from key customer segments... However, hotel­iers have had to come to terms with the fact that the incentive rates quoted some 12-18 months ago now reflect a low yield compared with existing rates achieved from the independent business travel sector.

Solving this dilemma to the satisfaction of all parties involved may prove to be a considerable challenge for the industry, as long as lead times still stretch to one or even two years.

Transport

There can be no incentive travel without some form of transport being used, and, as in the case of hotels, this market provides transport operators with an opportun­ity to sell their most expensive products and make healthy profits. But, again as for hotels, transport operators' chances of success in the incentive sector depend entirely on them making an extra effort to meet - and exceed - the expectations of their passengers.

In this sector, the transport element is often not seen simply as a means to an end -getting to the destination - but as part of the incentive experience itself, characterised by pleasure, exclusivity and uniqueness. For this reason, many operators make the effort to use the journey as an opportunity to make their incentive passengers feel special. For example, a company using the Eurostar as transport for its incentive trip has a wide range of unique benefits to choose from to make its award winners feel privileged. These include in-carriage branding with the company logo, on-board entertainment, personalised on-board welcome messages, as well as gifts as a souvenir of their Eurostar trip.

It is the airline sector that is used most frequently to convey incentive winners to their destinations. One indicator of the importance of incentive groups to airlines is the fact that, by 2000, dedicated conference and incentive departments had been established in 60% of the airlines responding to a Conference and Incentive Travel magazine survey (Roberts, 2000). However, on the down side, it was found that in the majority of cases these departments were staffed by only one person, which meant that some agencies were experiencing delays in getting vital quotes for the airlines' group rates from these departments.

The conclusion of the survey was that the key feature required of the airlines, by incentive travel organisers, was flexibility. One example of the need for this arises in the question of passenger lists. Clearly, passengers' names are not available until the winners of the incentive programme have been selected, and, as with group travel of any kind, there can always be last-minute changes to the list of those trav­elling. This can be a major problem for incentive travel organisers if they are deal­ing with an airline that requires final passenger lists weeks or even months before the actual flight - as many do. However, on the positive side, the respondents to the survey showed that they were responding to the need for flexibility: 32% of them allowed name changes less than three days before travel - an increase from the previous year's 12% of airlines offering such a service.

Another specific need for flexibility arises from the need of incentive trip organ­isers to be able to book seats well in advance. A total of 85% of airlines were found to allow reservations one year in advance of travel, double the percentage of the previous year's survey. Finally, incentive travel organisers are known to appreciate dedicated group check-in facilities for their award winners, and 90% of airlines claimed to offer this facility (Roberts, 2000).

Destinations

The other key supply-side elements in the incentive market are the destinations that are used for trips of this kind. Clearly, there are considerable benefits to cities and countries chosen as destinations for this form of business-related travel. On a per capita basis, incentive travel almost certainly provides the greatest spending levels of all forms of business travel, with the concomitant economic benefits for suppli­ers. But destinations' images are also enhanced when the experience of incentive groups is a wholly positive one. Elliott (1997) emphasises this point, with the exam­ple of Australia as a destination: 'If an incentive or other programme is successful, it can have favourable repercussions, as when thePresident of the lingerie company Charle Corporation, Mr Masaharu Hayashi, endorsed Australia as a first-class destination to his corporate peers, following an incentive visit of4,500 Japanese saleswomen to Sydney in 1992, spending A$10 million.'

So which destinations most successfully attract incentive events? O'Bricn (1997h) confirms that the USA and Europe remain the key geographic destinations for incentive travel programmes, although the Far East and Australia, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean are becoming increasingly popular incentive destinations:

With its geographical variety, rich supply of heritage and cultural resources, as well as its relatively high levels of security, the importance of Europe as a destination for incentive trips is generally acknowledged. Not only is it the main destination for incentives organised for European companies, but it has, since the 1960s, also been the primary international destination for US incentive groups.

A number of European countries are widely used as destinations by the US incen­tive market, although, as the research undertaken by the Menlo Consulting Group indicates (MCG, 1999), Europe tends to he reserved for experienced winners, who are most likely to have won other trips closer to home in the past.

For the outbound US incentive market, the same research showed that although Europe is important as an overseas destination, short-haul destinations dominate the international incentive market. The sun and sand destinations perform particu­larly well in this segment: 44.2% of incentive travellers visited the Caribbean, Bermuda or Hawaii on their most recent international incentive trip. Although technically a domestic destination, Hawaii represents an offshore oasis to many Americans and has a similar appeal to that of the Caribbean islands for incentive planners. One in five incentive travellers visited nearby Canada, Alaska or Mexico on their last incentive trip (MCG, 1999; p.20). Table 4.1 indicates the most popu­lar overseas destinations for US incentive trips.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that one in four US outbound incentive programmes has Europe as its destination, the use of Europe as a destination for incentive trips by the US market has developed along quite different lines to its use by European companies. Consequently, the characteristics of the American incentive market for Europe differ considerably from the characteristics of the intra-European market for incentive travel.

Table 3. European and US incentives in Europe

Source. Based on O'Brien. K. (1997b|. 'The incentive travel market to the UK and Ireland', in Insights, September, published by the English Tourism Council (Tel: 0208 563 3362).

Clearly, some of these differences may be explained through the cultural distinc­tions that exist between the two markets. For example, Americans, particularly if they are relatively unfamiliar with Europe, are most likely to be motivated by the opportunity to visit capital cities with attractive images, such as London, Paris and Rome. But since many European award winners are already well-travel led within the continent as a whole, they are likely to be attracted to more unusual destin­ations offering the opportunity to engage in new activities, e.g. a jeep safari in Cyprus or ice-fishing in Lapland.

Other contrasts between the US and the domestic use of Europe as an incentive destination are due to geographical factors. The US market makes more use of DMCs, for example, because, being remoter from Europe itself, Americans are more dependent on intermediaries on the spot to research and organise the details of the programme. Similarly, since they spend more time travelling in order to reach Europe than native Europeans do, their trips are, on average, longer. For Europeans themselves, short two- or three-day incentives in their own continent are perfectly feasible.

For the European domestic and outbound market, the debate among incentive travel organisers tends to revolve around the long-haul/short-haul destination deci­sion. Some agencies believe that even the most impressive short-haul programmes lack the impact and motivating factor of unusual and exotic long-haul destinations. Overfamiliarity with European cities is one hurdle to overcome. If such destinations are to be chosen as places in which to hold incentives, then they must demonstrate that they can be as effective at motivating staff as long-haul destinations are.

However, there are many in the industry who do not agree that further is necessar­ily better. In the report of an industry forum held to discuss this issue, Doyle (2001; p.21) quotes one incentive organiser: 'We get a lot of calls from people saying that the last thing they want to do on an incentive is get on a plane for seven or eight hours, because they do that all the time with their job. You can organise short-haul incen­tives that will get people talking just as much as long-haul.' Another contributor to the same forum introduced a new variant on the debate: the 'short long-haul trip'. 'Places like Dubai, for instance, are really coming into their own. They're not too far to get to and you can pack a lot into just three or four nights. You always have [airline] seats available, and there are enough carriers to get people there.'

Whether long-haul, short-haul or domestic, however, the difficulty for all destin­ations active in this market is that, of all forms of business travel, it is generally agreed that incentive travel is the most fickle. Novelty and fashion are major factors in the destination decision-making process, and today's hot new place to send incentive groups can be tomorrow's tired cliche.

But, above all, to be effective, the destination must succeed in motivating those who are competing to win the travel award. A basic requirement is that the destination should be perceived as being safe and politically stable. Any hint of danger or political volatility can disqualify an incentive destination overnight. As the authors of the BTF report point out, anticipating with some accuracy the impacts of the events of September 11 (BTF & BTAC, 1999; p.21): 'Incentive travel is most susceptible, however, to geo-political problems. War or an escalation of terrorist acts could easily wipe out the segment in a particular year, and it is not as resilient as other business tourism sectors - the incentive travel programme can take anything up to 18 months to build up again after the perceived danger disappears.'