The classic first assignment when kids return to school each fall is to write an essay addressing “What I did on my summer vacation.” A lot happens over three months when your days are wide open, but the focal point for these essays almost always is travel. Whether it’s a car trip to see cousins a few states over or a flight to a different country, the trips we take make memories that last long after a school essay has been marked up and handed back.
That’s the essence of incentive travel as a motivator in the workplace. Travel = fond memories, and fond memories = something we want to repeat.
In this issue’s cover feature on incentive travel, Dana Weaver, senior manager of marketing services at Growmark, an agricultural supply and grain cooperative, says his organization has used incentive travel to motivate sales representatives since 1952. Think of that — 1952! Is there any other sales tool that your company has used for the past 63 years?
The structure of incentive travel programs and how they are measured as an effective corporate investment has evolved over the past six decades, but the core element of why they work remains unchanged.
“Incentive travel is an opportunity to interact with senior management and with each other. That is why it is so valuable,” Weaver says. “When [our reps] get back from that trip in December or January, that’s about one-third of the way through their sales year. If we’ve done a good job of getting them psyched up and provided a rewarding experience, they want to be back for that reward and recognition next year, so they go home and get their butts to work.”
In October, more than 4,000 buyers and users of incentive travel will convene in Las Vegas for the fifth annual IMEX America trade show. They will visit with representatives from more than 150 countries. Like Growmark, many of the corporate end users and third-party planners at IMEX have taken top performers on trips for more than half a century. Yet they attend IMEX each year because the incentive travel industry is constantly in flux.
Incentive travel has staying power as a business tool because the notion that experiences make the most impactful memories still holds true. In that sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
