“ When she was bad , she was horrid ”

There ’ s a touch of the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead about incentive travel . You know the one … “ When she was good she was very , very good , and when she was bad she was horrid ”?

When incentive travel is bad , it ’ s definitely bad . It can easily descend into a lowest common denominator kind of stag or hen party with as much booze as you can consume , all paid for by the badly misfiring , sponsoring company . Then , for journalists who hear about it , it ’ s a feeding frenzy and suddenly you have a torch-bearing , baying , lynch mob rounding on the unfortunate corporations and individuals who have been caught with their trousers down around their ankles ( and maybe not just metaphorically ).

Just when we thought these practices and reports were buried back in the nineties with DJ Shadow and TLC , another raises its horrid head and , last year , we had the UK ’ s Financial Times crawling all over a story of crass corporate excess at a dinner in a posh London hotel . So the cycle repeats itself and , once again , incentive travel and motivational experiences are dragged into the mire .

So , yes , when it ’ s bad it ’ s decisively bad . It is , indeed , horrid . But what about when incentive travel is good ? Is it ever “ very , very good ”? I believe it is . Indeed , I ’ d be so bold as to suggest it can be so good as to be transformative . Transformative for the participants who qualify for the trip , for the corporations that stage them and the destinations that host them .

Transformative for qualifiers

About a decade ago , I was part of the delivery team in Vienna for a very high end incentive experience . En route to the Gala Dinner venue , the spectacular Hofburg Palace , I fell in with a group of qualifiers among whom was Tom , due shortly to retire , on his last trip . “ It ’ s been a blast ,” I heard him say . “ When I see my high school buddies for our annual meet-up , I ’ m always struck by how none of them has really been outside the zip code where we grew up . Because of New Life ( not the real name of the insurance company for which he worked ), I ’ ve been all over the world : Sydney , New Delhi , Cape Town , Buenos Aires , Shanghai , and I ’ ve connected with people and places so radically different from where I come

from . I hear my buddies giving their opinions about Europe or China - places I ’ ve actually been to - and I smile to myself at their naivety . Winning these trips with New Life has opened my eyes to the world , made me a different person .”

Transformative for corporations

The Incentive Travel Industry Index ( ITII ), a joint initiative of SITE , IRF , and FICP with research partners Oxford Economics , has been tracking the evolving nature of incentive travel over the past number of years . In that time we ’ ve noticed a clear migration away from tangible ROI objectives such as financial return and increased profitability , to intangible outcomes like engagement , relationship building , the fostering of company culture .

Above : Padraic Gilligan

Below : SITE has been to the mountaintop