A Travel Incentive Trips-for-Two Program is, Actually, Easier to Run than a Merchandise Program.
- Because number 1: Nothing, absolutely nothing to purchase to get started.
- Because number 2: No time wasted picking out the award, purchasing the award, stocking & shipping the award.
- Because number 3: No time wasted worrying whether or not the participants already own one.
- Because number 4: No contract to sign, no minimum to guarantee, no money up front.
- Because number 5: Nothing left over, nothing to return, no newer model replaced your prize, no competitor’s model made your prize obsolete.
The icing on the cake: When you finally have to pay, you pay from the incremental profit that is already in the bank, delivered by the winners who have already made their goal.
A Travel Incentive Trips-for-Two is not only easier but more welcome. We know, as we wrote on our website, “... there is almost no human emotion more powerful than Man’s need to ‘walk on the sands of a distant shore.’”
We are believers in the remarkable benefits of group travel incentives, however, group travel incentives are not easier to run than a merchandise program. Group travel incentives require up front monies, blocking of airline seats, the reserving of rooms, reserving sightseeing tours, and designing memorable daytime & nighttime events. Group travel incentives, however, are worth every speck of effort. The rewards they produce in increased excitement, increased sales, increased loyalty are legendary. No merchandise program has ever or can ever compare to a properly structured group travel incentive.
However we speak in this blog of the ease of designing a Travel Incentive Trips-for-Two program. Which is generally a one or two month - maximum three month - sprint contest designed to generate immediate response from the sales force or channel dealer-distributor family.
These programs are “shovel-ready.” All you need to do is 1. Set goals to achieve the objective 2. Announce the contest and 3. Promote the contest. Promoting the contest is the most difficult yet the most essential ingredient if the contest is to successfully achieve the objective.
A Travel Incentive is not an expense ... For those of you accustomed to writing reams of justification to get your incentive travel program into your companies fiscal forecast. Hear me out! I am telling you that any outlay of monies spent on a properly structured travel incentive will return more than the amount paid out in additional profits. Thus a profit generator (profit center).
Here comes the example to validate my assertion: A long, long time ago, when I was a lad, I worked as an Ad Director for a vacuum cleaner manufacturer. I firmly believed we could persuade our distributor’s to sell more vacs than they ever thought they were capable of selling if we could offer them a good enough reason. We finally decided to offer each of them a trip to Rome, Italy (with spouses) in return for a set number of vacumn cleaners purchased. Perfect choice because until the early sixties the only way to Rome from the USA was by cruise ship, or prop planes that stopped three times and took about 26 hours. This was the early 60’s so none of our distributors had ever been to Rome.
We had the prize, we could make the vacs. We needed just the money to run the trip! So I created this "P&L Pro Forma" (that’s what we called it), to convince our president that we had the money to run the trip. Because I knew that a travel incentive could generate its own budget – because it is a profit center!
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The year was 1964 (as I said, I was a young lad)
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We did about $20 million annual volume in 1964, each of those dollars is worth eight of today’s dollars. We were, in essence, a $160 million company in today’s dollars.
