Your team works hard. You want to motivate and reward them for their dedication and their wins — because, ultimately, their success is your success. What better way to do that than by offering your top performers with an awesome travel incentive program and a side of VIP treatment?
While a fully planned group trip is an incredible experience for your winners, it also comes with huge benefits for your company, including:
When thinking about launching a travel incentive program, it can seem a bit overwhelming. How do you develop an incentive program that works? But that’s what we’re here for. We help walk you through every step, making sure details are taken care of, and your event will be one to remember.
There are four basic steps to developing a successful travel incentive program:
- Set your goals
- Define your travel experience
- Promote your program
- Determine your results
Let’s break it down a bit, shall we?
Step 1: Set Your Incentive Program Goals
As a leader, we are willing to bet you are already well-versed in setting lofty goals. In fact, if you are reading this, you likely already have some stretch goals in mind.
It is important to set yourself up for success when you’re building the foundation for your incentive travel program. But where do you start?
First, identify what you want your incentive program to accomplish. Is it to increase sales and profit margins? Reduce mistakes or accidents? Inspire a more motivated team? Provide team building experiences? Improve employee or customer retention? All of the above?
Once you’ve chosen your goals to focus on, think about the people you need to motivate to reach these goals.
Who is your target audience?
Many times, it’s a subset of your employees, like a sales team or a customer service department, or maybe it’s the full team to inspire reaching company-wide goals. Or perhaps it’s your customers you want to engage.
Whoever your target audience is, it is important to establish qualification guidelines that are clear and challenging, yet achievable. Include both qualitative and quantitative metrics that are required to win the trip. Then, project a conservative estimate for how many people you think will win the award.
Designate someone internally who can be responsible for administering, tracking and promoting the program. Maybe that’s you, or maybe it’s another team member. Either way, the Achieve team can offer support to this person every step of the way.
Step 2: Define Your Travel Experience
With travel incentives, you have the opportunity to give your most loyal stakeholders the trip of a lifetime. They deserve a luxurious experience for their hard work and dedication. And you deserve to have a little fun with it, too.
First, set your budget. Everyone wants to shoot for the stars, but it’s most important to be realistic. The good news is, our team at Achieve excels at finding amazing deals with our network of destination vendors, so we can help you stretch those budget dollars.
Next, outline your contest period. This is the specific timeframe your potential award winners have to aim towards reaching the contest goals. This could be the calendar year or even a six-month period. Once the promotion period is set, decide which month you would like to host your travel incentive. Best practices are to set the trip dates within a month or two of the promotion period ending. In doing so, your winners will feel their reward soon after they have reached their goals.
And finally, come up with a name for your program. Whether it’s “President’s Club,” “Chairman’s Circle,” or “Apex Earners,” make sure it brings in an element of exclusivity and a VIP vibe, and consider spicing it up with some of your values.
Lastly, think about what type of trip experience will best motivate your target audience and their unique demographics. Does a domestic exploration or an international jaunt sound more appealing? Are they into food? History? Different cultures? Should it be relaxing or adventurous?
Determine the length of your trip (4 – 5 nights is most common) and what kinds of authentic and memorable events and tours you want to incorporate for your attendees. Get creative, and have fun!