Each year the crème de la crème of the Incentive Travel industry assembles in a motivational destination to discuss, debate and dialogue around the nature, purpose & direction of incentive travel.

At our Global Conference in Thailand we launched The Bangkok Manifesto to channel all of this extraordinary thought leadership into a series of key statements to capture a new, emerging vision and mission for Incentive Travel for the year to come.

We workshoped these statements with an invited group of influencers and then crowdsourced the final text of The Bangkok Manifesto with the entire assembly during the closing session of conference.

Starting with over 50 statements about incentive travel, we ended with the 10 listed below.

1. Every stakeholder in the incentive travel community should embrace social responsibility as a core part of their business philosophy and recognise that our business practices and policies will define how that responsibility is exercised.
2. Relationships and teamwork build business results, not isolated individual effort.  And nothing creates and strengthens relationships more effectively than shared incentive travel experiences.
3. Incentive travel contributes significantly to economic growth, partnerships within and between organisations, and innovative thinking by both participants and the organisations that create the programmes.
4. The interests, aspirations and perspectives of incentive programme participants should be placed centre stage in our industry’s strategic thinking and advocacy work.
5. The definition of luxury has changed.  The era of logos and brands is ending.  Luxury in future will be defined by authentic, unique and personal experiences.
6. Incentive travel helps to create corporate cultures that are fuelled by motivation and focused on future success.
7. Inclusivity should become a critical concept for our industry –we believe that incentive travel changes behaviour and builds motivation at all levels of an organisation.
8. Our industry must encourage more second and third-tier cities and non-urban destinations to embrace incentive travel as part of their business mix, highlighting that success in our business is not dependent on massive infrastructure or investment.
9. Incentive travel drives human capital excellence and innovation within destinations, with profound benefits for other targeted business segments.
10. Emerging destinations that include incentive travel in their strategic plans will experience faster economic growth and human capital development than would otherwise be the case.

Formally agreed by 182 votes to 11 during the General Closing Session of SITE Global Conference, Bangkok, January 2019

After SITE Global Conference we invited 10 experienced incentive travel professionals to write a short commentary on each statement. These were then gathered and published in a beautiful 40 page booklet (some copies are still available but they are becoming a collector’s item!).

However, you can download the full text via the button below.