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Are you having a corporate incentive trip abroad? How do you go about its planning for your group? To get started, here are essential tips for a smooth corporate incentive travel that serves as a real motivational tool for employees who employers thank and reward for their excellent performance.
How to Plan for the Corporate Incentive Trip?
1. Choosing the right dates
Everyone experience a bad day from time to time. Your employees are no different. Challenging product testing, a new release or stressful projects, these are only some of the things your employees face on any given day.
When planning, choose a date that will not only align with the company’s organizational goals but also with the staffs’ mood. A few things to consider for the perfect timing include a slow office’s period, a good weather and minimal vacation/sick leave requests.
2. Hiring professionals to make it out
Corporate event planning is a tedious and time-consuming process. You might want to consider hiring a professional team that can help with the planning and management of this event.
These professionals have the contacts, experiences, resources, and materials ready to get the program or trip running smoothly.
More reasons to hire the pros in planning include keeping you on the budget. As you may know, you need to consider certain things, including hotel, travel, meals, logistics and transport, and so on, in order to determine the expenses.
All of these can add up quickly, so you should stick to a budget; however, doing it can be hard if you don’t have the experience for a corporate travel program.
Hiring the pros, you can put the burden off your shoulders because these people have the experience in keeping you under or in a budget as well as negotiating for the best prices.
And they don’t just also oversee the budget planning but also manage the entire team’s experience. With their help, you can avoid loss of focus, higher costs and less value to the company and the participants.
They can also source fun and crazy solutions for your corporate incentive trip that you won’t otherwise think about by yourself.
In short, corporate event professionals can help in organizing everything and deal with any problem if it arises.
Hiring them, you can sit back and relax rather than trying to do things yourself that is sometimes a recipe for disaster.
3. Planning ahead
This trip is a way of re-motivating workers and boosting their morale after a hard work period. It is also an excellent program for employees who reach the set objectives.
However, you should plan far ahead, ideally 18 months before the corporate incentive trip overseas.
There is a reason for this. Having a corporate incentive trip isn’t easy from the planning to the budgeting and the challenges to the results tracking.
While you can benefit from connections to vendors abroad and your experiences, you might not get enough from these if you don’t employ proper planning techniques.
After all, running or attending an event in an unfamiliar place abroad is difficult even with great negotiation skills and years of experience in your industry.
The secret is early planning to allow eligible employees a chance to earn the incentive travel as well as to build excitement around it.
So the bottom line, you must prepare anywhere between one year to 18 months prior to the planned corporate incentive trip factoring in the event’s location, scope, and size.
Don’t forget to research seasonal trends for the location and a list of activities to do.
4. Dealing with the budget
An incentive trip’s expenses should have a return on investment matching the initial budget and must be reasonable.
One tip, you should try optimizing the budget by selecting a location with favorable tax implication.
Based on an Incentive Research Foundation Outlook Study 2018, the average incentive travel cost is $3,915/person.
But according to a source, this figure could go a bit higher at $4,500/person for a corporate trip. It is a for a six-day and five-night duration within North America.
For help, you can also make use of an incentive-travel budget estimator online to let you pick a destination, hotel star rating, number of activities and other things that can help in estimating the budget for the travel incentive.
5. Considering challenges
Planning for a corporate trip incentive abroad, you should be ready for the possible challenges or obstacles to meet along the way.
A few of these include organizational structure, employee morale, and market condition.
Other things to think about include whether the trip will be outsourced to an agency or managed internally.
You should also consider tax implications. For one, the corporate incentive trip may require taxation to the recipients or special tax forms.
6. Tracking results
Travel programs can help in supporting the organizational culture, but to achieve it, you must know if the attendees are engaged with other earners and the destination.
You can use a special mobile event app to monitor data points. Some information it can collect include the number of messages the participants send to each other, the number of times that they access onsite agenda and the number of goals reached, to name some.
Tip: More activities are a good sign, but start asking questions if you notice low engagement results.
Alternatively, you should ensure that your employees provide regular reports as to how close they are towards the goal, for instance.
Also, check out how each participant is doing. It is more important than determining how close the company is to the main objective. You can also use an event website where the employees can log in daily to check how they’re doing. It is a good motivator than knowing that they’re only a few steps away from reaching their goals.
Conclusion
Having a corporate incentive trip abroad is a great way to motivate employees. It also sets an excellent atmosphere for team building activities, honest corporate discussions and conversations, goal sharing and relaxation.
This incentive travel is a pleasure trip for employees. It is a reward for the good results they’re bringing to the table. But if you need help, don’t think twice about hiring a corporate event planning team that has the resources, experience, contacts, and knowledge to make this trip memorable for employees and less stressful for you.
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Adriana Beth's a content writer and freelance blogger. She is responsible for the Content Marketing of Events by Contessa company. She has a passion for event planning and lifestyle blogging.
