SITE
Where on earth are
we going with incentive travel?
DIDIER SCAILLET, CEO OF SITE, SHARES SOME DATA INDICATING
WHICH DESTINATIONS ARE COMING TO THE FORE FOR INCENTIVE BUYERS
love the ambiguity of the
heading above. It calls out
two core outcomes from the
recently released Incentive
Travel Industry Index, SITE’s
collaborative research project that we
conduct annually with our friends at
Financial & Insurance Conference
Professionals (FICP) and Incentive
Research Foundation (IRF).
This year’s index provides lots of ‘aha’
moments around the big questions as to
the nature, purpose and direction of
incentive travel. It also gives us extensive
empirical data about where incentive
travel programmes are travelling, which
destinations are in vogue, and whether
long haul travel is in or out.
I hope to return over the next number
of months to the big questions about
incentives, as this piece dovetails nicely
with SITE’s own interrogations captured
between the covers of The Bangkok
Manifesto - the 10 statements about
incentive travel that we crowdsourced in
Thailand last January.
For this month, however, I want to
focus on something tactical: which
destinations are coming to the fore for
incentive travel professionals around the
world?
The first point to make here is
something we’ve known for a long time.
Most incentive trips remain within the
regional source market within which
they were contracted in the first place.
Thus, most North American business
goes to the US, Canada, Mexico and the
Caribbean; most UK and German
business (the biggest source markets for
incentives in Europe) stays in Europe,
and so on. So where are planners
in third position, with South East Asia
and China fourth and fifth respectively.
Previously popular destinations for
Europeans, such as Dubai and other Gulf
States, do not rank in the top 5 aggregate
figures for corporate and agency
planners. Here’s how it looks:
1. Europe
2. Eastern Europe
3. US
4. South East Asia – Thailand
5. China
considering over the next few years?
Looking to 2021 and 2022, US
planners are still solid on the US as the
most popular destination but, good news
for EU DMCs, destinations in Western
Europe rank next. The Caribbean,
Canada and Mexico occupy the next
three positions and, somewhat
surprisingly, Australia and New Zealand
come in after that.
Then South East Asia locations like
Thailand outrank closer to home
locations like South America. So, for
corporate and agency planners in North
America, this is how the regions rank:
Interestingly, there’s quite a difference
in destination selection if we compare the
selections of corporate end users with
those of incentive travel agencies. For
European corporate planners, the US
returns in second position and gulf
destinations rank in 4th place while,
surprisingly, China and Japan rank third,
ahead of the US, for the 125 European
agencies who submitted responses.
The survey this year was based on
over 2,650 responses and provided rich
and deep data points that can provide
great clarity around the future of our
business.
Above:
Pedestrian
bridge in
Bangkok,
Thailand
1. USA
2. Western Europe – Spain, France, Italy
3. Caribbean / Canada / Mexico
4. Australia / New Zealand
5. South East Asia - Thailand
For Europe, the primacy of the region
itself as both source market and
destination is maintained with adjacent
Eastern European countries solid in
second position. Despite rumblings over
politics and visa obstacles, the US comes
ISSUE 103
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CONFERENCE & MEETINGS WORLD
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