Travel Awards, Let the Buyer Beware

This post by Paul Hebert of Incentive Intelligence is right on the money. If you want to know about buying any type of group business meeting or incentive travel, this is a perfect place to start. If you’ve been buying group business meeting or incentive travel, this is a great refresher.
You don’t see much written in this blog about group travel, but in all the years we were active in the incentive industry about half of the awards we sold did in fact have to do with moving a lot of people all over the world to a lot of great (and on a rare occasion not so great) destinations. Travel was and still is in my opinion the most motivational of all awards. Unfortunately it typically only applies to certain objectives in the business world, usually sales and marketing, and then only to a small percentage of your participant base that you are trying to motivate.

Paul concludes with a section on value and trust. As so often happens in this relationship selling business, the value received for what you pay is often based on the relationship you have with the person providing the value. Frankly, anyone can sell you a hotel, some plane tickets, and buses to move your people back and forth. But not everyone can design a program that produces results, and that I believe is why you are investing so heavily in travel in the first place?

While travel is the most complex of all awards to purchase in this business, it is also one of the least profitable awards to the companies that sell it. It is quite often three or even four times less profitable than traditional catalog merchandise awards. The pricing and value of other incentive and recognition awards can be just as elusive as travel and is often hidden in decades old pricing schemes designed to keep the real value of the award hidden. It will behoove you to dig deep into all pricing to ensure that your participants get the true value of your award budget.

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