Ask a recently returned incentive travel winner to describe his or her trip to you, and it usually starts with a plane ride to an exotic, warm-weather destination … a greeting by smiling, uniformed trip directors … a welcoming drink … a deluxe double room.

It continues with cocktail parties and poolside buffets … golf and tennis … beach parties and dine-arounds … and it concludes with a farewell banquet, abundant thanks, and kudos all around. It’s a pretty picture of pleasant recollections, and every time you hear a description like it, you’ll know that someone has just set the incentive travel industry back 20 years.

Was there not a single moment that burned itself in the mind forever?

One event so unusual and uncommon that the guests knew it was created especially for them?

Was there not anything they did that they couldn’t have done on their own?

Does the mind radiate, do the passions stir at the recollection and recounting of the experience?

If these questions cannot be answered with resounding affirmatives, then someone is guilty of creating a "typical" incentive travel program.

There Should be Nothing Typical about the Typical Incentive.

Picture it. You’ve just asked someone … a salesperson or a distributor … for a 20 percent increase over what they have been doing. Do you really think that people (who already think they’re killing themselves) will work 20 percent harder for a trip that they saw in the newspaper travel section for $449? Would you? I think not.

What, then, will drive someone to work the equivalent of an extra day every week for six months? The answer is not a trip. The answer is a travel experience … filled with surprises and special moments and personal touches and extraordinary events … an experience that they could not duplicate on their own no matter how wealthy they might be.

The corporate incentive award program is very much a moral contract between a company and its employees and/or customers. It says, in effect, "You do this for us, and we’ll reward you in a fashion that you’ll never forget." The "typical" incentive trip can be quickly forgotten if it is simply a blur of pleasant experiences.

Every single destination in the world is a unique piece of earth because of what has preceded today, what has happened to it and to its peoples. There is history and culture to be drawn out and transformed into magical moments … into theme parties, into pillow gifts … stories to be told with flair and sparkle … places to be seen through the looking glass that only the imagination can provide.

The First Billion Was Easy

In the last few decades incentive travel has skyrocketed to billions of dollars.

To a great extent, the growth occurred because the idea was so very good and several persevering souls chipped away at the natural resistance to a concept not in wide use in the 60s and, to a lesser extent, in the 70s.

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