At IMEX Frankfurt recently we launched the final piece of the three part inSITEs series with Participant inSITEs, a study of qualifiers attitudes to, and experiences of, incentive travel programmes.

Following that, along with our partners, Incentive Research Foundation and Oxford Economics, we have now released the 2023 edition of the Incentive Travel Index, our annual survey of the global incentive travel industry. This project will be fielding throughout June and July so be sure to pop over to siteglobal.com where you can find a link to the survey instrument.

But back to Participant inSITEs. You’ll find the full report on SITEGlobal.com The first section of Participant inSITEs breaks down findings on what makes participants feel ‘ready’ to participate in such programmes, focusing on incentive travel qualification criteria and communications patterns.

The second section then explores what gets participants ‘set’, what motivates them to qualify for an incentive programme, examining also the regional differences that emerge.

But I really want to discuss the third section of the survey, the ‘go’ section that evaluates the types of destinations, activities, and intangible benefits that, according to qualifiers, make incentive travel feel like a true reward.

The good news is that our almost 800 global qualifiers prefer travel rewards over cash or other bonuses – see Fig 1 below.

When it comes to destination preferences, overall, there’s good news in the survey results too with the lame/tame side of travel (resort, sunny beach) decisively less popular with qualifiers that the intrepid/exciting bit (Fig 2 below).

For there to be a lasting benefit to a travel experience, it has to take you out of your comfort zone, ideally exposing you to what the Italian writer Cesare Pavese called the ‘brutality of travel’. This is where travel becomes transformation, where other cultures and peoples are encountered and, as a consequence, an internal transformation is brought about in our own lives.

So it’s good to see a spirit of adventure in the destination choices and a preference for international (across nearly all the regions), surely the first level of challenge for a traveller.

When it comes to what activities qualifiers prefer during the incentive travel experience, I must confess to a minor modicum of disappointment (Fig 3 below).

Here we see a pervasive disengagement from the destination across all regions. Two regions omit ‘immersive cultural’ completely from their top 5 preferences and only European and North American qualifiers include it in their top 3, behind ‘free time’ and ‘time with spouse’.

When we compare these results with the results from other research projects in the inSITEs series (Corporate inSITEs and Leadership inSITEs), we find clear misalignment around programme design and inclusions.

Corporations favour activities and inclusions that foster relationship building between qualifiers and corporate leadership – after all, they’re paying for the trip! But this is NOT what qualifiers want.

With the exception of qualifiers from Africa Middle East who actually include ‘teambuilding’ and ‘time with colleagues’, no other region includes any ‘corporate’ activity other than Gala Dinner in their top 5.

Most qualifiers, it seems, want to be simply left alone, and, upon their return to their guest room in the evening, they’d like to find a nice gift.

When you work so hard to qualify for the trip, you want to be able to switch off, go into a cocoon, do nothing.

That said, I think we’re leaving something precious and valuable on the table by missing out on destination encounter. Maybe we need to be more intentional in our design?