Conference & Meetings World Issue 103 | Page 73

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 / CONFERENCE & MEETINGS WORLD / 73