Corporate travel incentive programs are crucial to reward and motivate regular flyers, partners, and business associates. These programs include non-monetary incentives to help organizations achieve several objectives to boost productivity in sales, manufacturing, and other performance-oriented departments. Organizing and implementing corporate incentive travel programs is a challenging task, but the benefits of these programs outweigh the challenges. Incentive travel is a successful motivational management strategy across several organizations, irrespective of their sizes. Companies plan business travel incentive programs for individual performers or teams with or without including their spouses as per the policies.
What is incentive travel?
Corporate travel incentive programs are performance-based strategies to reward, motivate, and engage employees or teams. These all-expense paid trips aim to incentivize performance within a specific period, like an annual performance. Management defines performance criteria and declares the business travel incentive at the beginning of the year for extensive participation across all territories and departments. Companies can meet various goals by planning incentive travel, which serves as a perk for better performance, morale, and engagement of employees. Team building, motivation, reward, employee retention, and productivity growth are a few goals of a business travel incentive program.
How do incentive travel programs work?
Corporate travel managers must collaborate with relevant department heads and other stakeholders to make the business travel incentive program a resounding success. Here are critical steps to plan and implement enjoyable and productive corporate travel incentive programs.
1. Determine the goal and audience
Organizations plan corporate incentive travel programs with specific objectives, like rewarding top sales performers to exceed annual sales targets or recognizing efforts of the purchase department to save costs. You may reward your production staff for exceeding production targets with a faster turnaround. Define the target audience, like sales executives or production staff. Determine employee levels, such as management staff or field staff.
2. Define criteria for eligibility
Set measurable, achievable, and time-bound objectives that will serve as eligibility requirements to qualify for corporate travel incentive programs. These may be percentage growth over the previous year, percentage achievement of targets, productivity, and cost savings.
3. Know what your employees expect
Understand the employees’ preferences, like their ideas of enjoyment and destinations, to improve acceptance of the business travel incentive program. You can enhance the success of the program by incorporating their ideas.
4. Fix the budget for an incentive travel program
Setting the budget is necessary for deciding the corporate tour package. Find out various options through your travel suppliers that align with your budget. A SaaS-based travel management platform like Paxes enables you to access a vast inventory of travel suppliers besides deals and discounts.
4. Create an itinerary for the incentive trip
After fixing the destination, create a detailed itinerary including tour dates, accommodations, activities, and the return journey. Decide the duration of the trip to suit your budget. The itinerary should not be too tiring for employees as the goal is to provide them with relaxation and recreation. Organize an award ceremony followed by a banquet. Invite the company’s chairperson or managing director to add value to the business travel incentive program.
Benefits of corporate travel incentive programs
The all-inclusive corporate travel incentive programs aim to reward performers and motivate teams to exceed achievements. These are vital benefits of incentive travel:
1. Relationship building
Employees can have meaningful interactions during incentive travel programs in a refreshing environment away from the monotonous office setting. They build stronger relationships while participating in fun activities. Corporate incentive travel programs are helpful for team building.
2. Employee retention and engagement
Rewards boost the attachment of the employees to the organization. Motivation and recognition are vital for improving employee engagement. These factors enhance productivity and retention.
3. Lasting effect
The positive effect of business travel incentive programs lasts longer than monetary benefits. The memories of the event linger on for a long time as snaps, videos, and discussions.
4. Promotes a healthy spirit of competition
Business travel incentive programs provide a leveled playing field for all employees to become eligible. It ensures healthy competition and boosts team performance as individual employees strive to perform for the success of their teams.
5. Enables succession planning
Corporate travel incentive programs help organizations identify top performers for grooming them to take up positions of higher responsibilities. These programs allow employees to showcase their skills as team players. Line managers can use incentive travel as the basis for succession planning.
Conclusion
Corporate travel incentive programs act as special perks to boost performance across employee levels and departments of the organization. Though these programs can cost a lot, the rise in productivity and performance often justifies the expenses.
Using an advanced travel management program like Paxes can significantly improve the cost-efficiency of incentive travel. A business travel incentive program is a strong motivator. Selling the incentive program by sending periodic communications about individual performances is crucial for higher productivity.
Suggested Read: All You Should Know About Corporate Travel Programs
Corporate Travel Incentive Programs FAQs
What types of incentives are common in organizations?
Besides monetary incentives, organizations provide high-value gifts, club memberships, event tickets, and fitness class sponsorships are a few popular incentives to reward performers.
How do corporate incentive travel programs help enhance brand reputation?
Employees like to share snaps and videos of incentive trips within their social media groups. The exposure will improve the brand image of the company across employees of other companies.
Is it possible to improve talent acquisition through business travel incentive programs?
Yes, employees prefer posting company reviews by mentioning various perks. These reviews help attract new talent.
How to justify the cost of business travel incentive programs?
Employees strive to improve performance to qualify for travel incentive programs. Higher productivity and exceeding performance objectives justify the expenditure of incentive travel.
