yvonne gordon

Irish Marketing Journal
Corporate Gifts, Hospitality & Incentives Supplement
October 2005

Travel and Leisure Incentives
Incentive travel and leisure is a popular way to motivate employees, customers and sales agents alike. Yvonne Gordon reports.

Aine Corrigan, head of AC Events, which manages the incentive travel business of Executive Travel, has worked in the incentive travel business for over ten years. She says that a lot of incentive schemes are sales target related - a company runs a scheme where sales people can qualify to go on a trip by reaching fixed sales targets. These schemes are popular with both the companies and the sales teams. Companies also run target based sales incentives for their customers and agents.

One of the biggest changes Corrigan has noticed in the last couple of years is that European destinations are becoming more popular – places such as Italy and Spain and also long haul. Destinations in the USA, particularly New York and Boston, as well as Dubai, Barbados and South Africa are popular. So are events such as formula one and soccer matches.

"A lot of companies like to run an incentive around an event - so there’s a focus to it," she says. "It gives a high profile and a client might undertake corporate hospitality at the event also."

Corrigan says that group and incentive travel are quite distinct – non-incentivised group travel, might bring employees away but incentive is a growing area and has been proven to work over the last 15 years. "Companies would not undertake it at the level they do if it didn’t work well," she says.

AC Events works with clients to ensure that sales incentives schemes meet their business objectives, maintaining that the success of any incentive travel programme should be measured by the incremental increase in individual performance. Corrigan says that incentive travel is an excellent relationship building opportunity and that AC Events aims to create a different and exciting experience, with an element of surprise, that the client will remember for a long time.

She has organised trips to South Africa that included a safari, golf, helicopter trip and cable car ride to Table Mountain. In Dubai, they organised camel rides, a Bedouin tent barbecue and catamaran cruise. Corrigan says that these trips can be spectacular – last year they did a trip with seaplanes going down the Florida Keys. They have also organised ballooning over plains of South Africa and helicopters over Victoria Falls.

Landround is another big player in the travel incentives market and has been operating in Ireland for about ten years. It specialises in travel and leisure vouchers that can be used in tactical promotions, for any industry from car dealers to fashion stores.

Landround’s clients include Cadburys, Londis and Bank of Ireland ran a promotion through Landround offering €200 holiday vouchers with every Smart Save account opened.

The vouchers can be for hotel breaks flights to anywhere in Europe or the USA, depending on the promotion, and are tailored to the market the scheme is running in. All the vouchers are travel related - other vouchers include things like passes for Disneyland resorts or Universal resorts and include vouchers for free accommodation.

"They work for the client as they drive the sales, the perceived value is very high," says Landround marketing executive Gareth Andrews. Landround has its own in-house bonded travel agent and looks after everything from planning and production to a scheme's promotion and fulfilment.

Andrews says that the company is trying to build up an international presence, currently operating schemes in the UK, Spain, Ireland and looking to expand further. He says the area is growing partly due to the flexibility of the programmes the company offers. "The mechanic is very simple, unlike a lot of competitors, particularly in the UK," he says. "There are some big players but there are a lot of conditions to client joining the programme – a lot of up-front costs and additional costs. We’re quite straightforward in the mechanics we offer."

Andrews says their products are competitive in the environment of staff reward schemes, and can also be used as a business to business tool. "We are doing a big scheme with Hotpoint UK to incentivise independent retailers to sell Hotpoint white goods. They can brand the scheme as they wish so they are calling it ‘Hotpoints’.

One of Landround’s biggest incentive schemes is ‘buy and fly!’ which was launched in Ireland three years ago. Landround started the division when it found that clients were using vouchers for tactical promotions and wanted permanent way to run them.

Buy and fly is a points based reward programme. Customers register on the internet and get 50 points to start off with. Tesco is one of their biggest partners in Ireland, and Tesco clubcard holders can convert clubcard points into buy and fly points. (A €50 spend gets 50 clubcard points which can convert into ten buy and fly points).

Andrews says that the fact that rewards are easily achievable, starting from as little as ten points, is key to the success of buy and fly. Other partners include Statoil, O2, Heaton’s and Tierneys. American Express membership rewards can be exchanged for buy and fly rewards and Brown Thomas are using buy and fly as a staff incentive.

Michel McHugh of CSL Associates incentive travel division, says that incentive travel overlaps with corporate hospitality. CSL organises a lot of golf and finds that clients like to play signature courses. "If they are in the south of Spain, they want to play Valderrama, or if in the Sates, they want to play Sawgrass," he says.

One of the main things about incentive travel, from a client’s point of view, is that it is a reward for something, so McHugh recommends that companies try to organise something that a person wouldn’t do for themselves – either an unusual destination or activities when they get to destination. CSL always try to link to an event and McHugh says it is amazing what people can look at. People might travel to Vienna but will have never been to the Opera House until they go on incentive travel.

McHugh says the important thing is how you package a destination. While CSL is starting to see a lot more of long distance travel to places like South America, he says Paris is still one of the best incentive destinations in the world. "There’s lots to do and also, significant events that have relevance to Ireland take place there, big rugby and soccer events and races," he says. "People build incentives around events like that."

The question of whether incentive travel works or not is proven by the fact that it is such a huge and growing area. McHugh says that international research has proved that incentive travel is very popular and with cheap airfares and exotic destinations around the world becoming more accessible, it looks likely to stay a vibrant market for some time to come.

© Yvonne Gordon 2005