Today’s corporate incentives require a business objective, but that doesn’t rule out some more imaginative options...Hillgate Travel provides seven tips when booking incentive travel.
PLANNING & BUDGET
Timescales are hugely important and 24 month lead-in times are not uncommon for larger incentives. It has to be the right reward - finalise how much you have available to spend on the incentive and decide whether it can be spread across various prizes (and achievements) or a single high value reward*
TIMESCALE
Set a time period for when you want the employee to use the reward by (you need to ensure it is redeemed and you don’t want it leaking over to the next incentive period) Also ensure you include any T&C’s and potential blackout periods
PRIZE
Consider offering travel vouchers, where the TMC can be responsible for working with your winner to redeem their prize on a trip of their choice, or multiple cheaper trips dependent on the value (this gives the winner much more flexibility on how they utilise their voucher and can appeal to a much wider audience)
MEASUREMENT
If the incentive is based on a sales target, then review how well the incentive worked and what value the incentive brought to the business. This is hugely important as these incentives could result in substantial business growth and provide a worthy ROI.
CONSISTENCY
There is an opportunity to create a following here. Consider frequency when planning incentive travel (i.e. if people didn’t win the trip to Monaco last year, they will be talking about how they are going to win it next year. If you only do it one time, it will likely be quickly forgotten about!)
PR
Use incentive travel as a PR tool internally across the business. Promote front runners, share updates and bring it to life. Incentive Travel can also be a great external PR tool when attracting new talent into the business for example.
EXCITEMENT
Make the prize something your employees actually want to win. Motivation is key - some prizes are far more exclusive than others and if you want to drive engagement, make your team thirsty!
*one Hillgate client took over 100 employees away on a trip together, another took 5 partners on a European cruise
Read the full feature on incentive travel