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Best Corporate Travel Programs – Three Key Features that Set the Experts Apart

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Planning incentive-based travel trips that reward employees for great performance is similar to playing the game of golf: Almost anyone can do it, but few people do it exceptionally well. This is why your company should consider using the services of a travel planner that has experience in helping companies get the most value from their corporate travel programs.

Compared to travel planners that lack experience with corporate travel programs, planners that specialize in corporate travel typically possess three key features: They help you plan the trip down to the smallest detail, assist you with choosing trip activities that are unforgettable, and provide travel staff to attend you on your trip. Let’s take a look at the benefits of each feature.

1. Comprehensive Planning

Comprehensive planning starts with major tasks such as hotel negotiation and airline contract negotiation and ends with detail-oriented tasks such as ensuring that hotel spa services include specific treatments and ensuring that a specific type of champagne will be available on the flight. Your standard travel planner will handle the big details, but it won’t spend hours making sure that your trip is meticulously planned down to the smallest, value-added travel benefits.

2. Unforgettable Activities

We like to say that unforgettable travel activities have what we call the “wow factor”. Unless employees are “wowed” by what they experience on a trip, their motivation to qualify for the next trip may not be especially high, which could translate into mediocre sales growth and an average customer retention rate for the coming year. Activities for trips we plan are more than just fun. They are unforgettable occasions that motivate employees to qualify for the next trip.

3. Dedicated Travel Staff

Almost everyone who has taken their fair share of vacation trips has experienced some type of glitch in travel plans that a trip would have been more enjoyable without. This is why travel planners that have expertise in corporate travel programs commonly include on-site travel staff for your trip. If any aspect of the trip isn’t going as expected, or you need personal assistance during activities, on-site travel staff will be there to make the situation right and lend a hand.

Ready to Plan an Incentive Travel Trip?

If so, you’ve come to the right place. Incentive Travel Solutions has years of experience helping companies of all sizes in various industries leverage corporate travel programs to provide highly meaningful rewards for top performers, and increase annual productivity by motivating these employees to qualify for the next trip. Comprehensive trip planning, planning unforgettable trip activities, and providing on-site travel staff are three essential keys for achieving the goals.

To get started on planning a corporate travel trip that can have a positive impact on customer retention and sales growth, please call us today at (704) 540-1482, or complete our contact form. We look forward to helping you plan trips that are highly memorable for your top performers and motivate them to work even harder for the success of your company.

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5 Employee Incentive Programs That Work

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Motivating their employees to perform at the highest level has always been a challenge for companies. In most most cases, employees perform well, but how do you get them to go the extra mile and maximize their capabilities? One way to provide this motivation is to implement a performance-based reward program that compensates employees who reach important business goals. Below are five great examples of employee incentive programs that work.

Salary Increase

Most employees enter a profession with an idea of how much salary they expect to earn, as they gain experience and attain higher positions within the company. Providing employees with meaningful annual bonuses both satisfies them presently and motivates them to work harder to realize the dream of business success that they have envisioned achieving for many years.

Performance Bonuses

Every company knows that the business performance of employees is tied to financial compensation. As honorable as a company’s mission may be — and as enjoyable as the work environment is — money still makes the business world go around. The nice thing about performance bonuses is that they aren’t set in stone. The harder employees work, the more they can expect to receive in performance bonuses. In terms of productivity, this is a winning situation.

Valuable Special Gifts

Rewarding excellent performance with a special gift is another way to keep employees motivated from quarter to quarter. Naturally, the nicer the gift, the more motivation it inspires. For example, there is a big difference between offering a top performer a gift certificate to a salon and offering him or her a new BMW. If you want your employees to strive for new business heights, put your money where your mouth is, and offer them a truly valuable, special gift.

Opportunity for Promotion

Failing to be promoted after they have demonstrated business excellence is one of the main reasons employees leave a company in pursuit of better opportunities at companies where they would expect to feel more appreciated. Human resources are the most valuable resources, as the old saying goes. In order to put the principle into practice, you need to reward top performers with lucrative promotions. Otherwise, they may become bored and feel poorly paid.

Qualifying for an Incentive Travel Trip

When it comes to employee incentive programs that work, giving top performers the opportunity to qualify for a travel trip that entails a highly desirable destination and travels filled with unforgettable experiences, is the most unique incentive presented here, but it is also one of the most effective, especially for well-paid employees who are near the top of the career ladder. The exceptional uniqueness of the trip naturally motivates such employees to qualify for the next one.

Ready to Plan a Travel Trip?

If your company is dedicated to retaining top talent and compensating top performers with meaningful awards, it should consider making incentive travel trips a part of the reward structure. With the assistance of Incentive Travel Solutions, the trips you offer will be ones that create lasting memories, help employees form stronger bonds as co-workers, and motivate them to work diligently to qualify for the next incentive-based travel trip.

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Work Incentives: Incentive Travel Trips Versus Performance Bonuses

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work-incentivesWhich would you rather receive: an employer-sponsored, free trip to a beautiful destination that includes a plethora of unique, entertaining events, or the money it would cost to send you on the trip in the form of a bonus check? If you aren’t accustomed to receiving big bonuses, you might be tempted choose the latter, but if sizeable performance bonuses have been a part of your employment history for several years, you might feel inclined to choose the unique trip instead.

This is one reason why thriving companies offer travel trips as work incentives to employees who perform at the top of their game. Often, these employees are considered “top talent” and have reaped the benefits of that status in the form of large, performance-based bonuses. “Money talks,” as the old saying goes, but for top talent, incentive travel trips often talk more convincingly, as it were, serving as ideal work incentives for the four reasons listed below.

  1. More Tangible Than Money

Receiving money is exciting, but only because receiving the things that money can buy is even more exciting. For most companies that offer them, incentive travel trips aren’t a way to economize on compensating top performers. Rather, they are a different way of compensating them — a reward that top performers might spend their generous bonuses on if they had the opportunity to do so. Due to the exceptional uniqueness of the trips, that chance seldom exists.

  1. Nearly Impossible to Recreate

The anatomy of an incentive travel trip is as follows: A company sends qualifying employees on an exciting journey that the company pays for. While on the trip, travelers experience unique forms of entertainment that are selected with the help of an incentive travel trip planner. Bonding with fellow employees while enjoying novel entertainment is a highly rewarding experience on a personal level, and is typically an experience that is almost impossible to create on one’s own.

  1. Improves Employee Relationships

For most companies, incentive travel trips are about more than rewarding top performers with unique travel experiences. The trips also serve to strengthen relationships between employees by having them share an unforgettable experience. When they return to the work after the trip, their strengthened relationships help foster a team environment that exhibits good morale. Simply rewarding employees with bonuses doesn’t promote these qualitative benefits.

  1. Doesn’t Replace Annual Bonuses

Companies that offer incentive travel trips seldom use them to replace annual bonuses. Due to budgetary considerations, bonuses may be smaller than they would be if the trips were not offered, but top performers aren’t left wishing that they had received bonuses instead of a trip to a special destination. Most companies offer incentive travel trips as rewards that extend beyond bonuses to further motivate a company’s most valuable performers to maintain top performance.

Start Planning Your Trip Today
Annual bonuses are great work incentives for rewarding employees for excellent performance, but incentive travel trips in the reward structure can deliver benefits that bonuses alone do not, particularly strong employee relationships that improve morale in the workplace. For assistance planning a trip that promotes these benefits, call us today at (704) 540-1482. We look forward to providing you and your dedicated employees with a work incentive like no other!

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A Simple Idea Every CEO Should Consider to Boost Sales

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Experienced CEOs know that business productivity is inevitably tied to how well employees are compensated, especially when it comes to sales. Companies naturally seek out the best talent for their sales teams, but having all the talent in the world means nothing unless you can motivate it to perform at the highest level. One way that CEOs can inspire their carefully selected sales teams to increase productivity and boost sales is offering an incentive-based trip.

Incentive-Based Trips: What Are They?
Incentive-based trips are rewards that thriving companies offer to employees who meet or exceed a preset business goal. In sales, the goal may involve such things as nurturing a certain percentage of leads into clients, retaining a certain percentage of existing customers, and exceeding last year’s revenue goal by a certain percentage. The business goal is yours to choose, and so is the type of trip that employees take after they achieve the goal.

A Unique Look at Cost Effectiveness
At first glance, an incentive-based trip can seem like an expensive way to motivate and reward sales professionals. After all, the trips often involve a high level of novelty and luxury in terms of destination, planned activities, and lodging. However, it is the novelty of the trips that can make them a cost effective way to deliver a meaningful, performance-based reward to employees.

For example, for many people, the novelty of playing golf on a beautiful, seaside course in Ireland is worth far more in experiential value than it is in monetary value. For the trip’s provider, this phenomenon can create a great amount of financial flexibility when planning the trip, especially when the provider works with a professional trip planner to secure the best prices.

Facilitating an Incentive-Based Trip
Because they often involve multiple travelers, incentive-based trips can present logistical and financial obstacles that the average vacation would not, such as airline contract negotiations, hotel contract negotiations, and web registration processes. The good news is that a professional planner of incentive based trips, such as Incentive Travel Solutions can help you move past these obstacles with ease. You can focus on work while we solidify your travel plans.

Contact Us Today
As long as they have established the performance-based goal that triggers the reward, it is never too early for CEOs to start planning an incentive-based trip for their sales team. The more time that we have to make arrangements for your travels, the more flexibility we have to get you the best possible prices for traveling to your destination, inhabiting it in style, and having a fabulous time enjoying fun filled, leisurely activities while you are there.

To get started on planning an incentive-based trip for your company’s hard working sales team, call Incentive Travel Solutions today at (704) 540-1482, or fill out our contact form. We look forward to helping you create a trip that your sales team will remember forever and work hard to qualify for in the meantime by boosting sales numbers to new heights!

Incentive Travel Trips Will Improve Employee Productivity

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If you are a manager for a business, and you are in charge of employees, you might notice, at times, that company morale wanes. Even worse, you might encounter and increasingly unmotivated team with little to no motivation to improve their working habits and productivity. Smart companies who are experiencing this unfortunate indifference of employees toward their jobs will be hard at work to find a solution to the lethargic output. One successful way to boost morale and productivity would be to incorporate incentive travel trips.

Incentive travel trips will improve employee productivity. An all expense paid trip is a morale boosting incentive that offers something special for employees to look forward to as long as they meet or achieve certain requirements or a quota at their job. A paid vacations is also an effective solution that is a win-win for both sides, as employees earn a marvelous and one of a kind reward, and business owners acquire newly motivates employees who will help boost production. Feedback from companies that have already instilled this type of incentive prove how miraculously effective this solution has been for improving work ethic and overall revenue.

If you still need more convincing, then you should speak to a member of a professional and successful incentive travel organization such as Incentive Travel Solutions. Because we have been an absolute success in this industry for many years, and we are ready and willing to provide any information you need to decide whether this type of incentive is right for your company. We firmly believe that after speaking with one of our representatives, you will be convinced that incentive travel trips will improve employee productivity at your place of business, and you will be ready to allow ITS to book the vacation of a lifetime for those who meet your standards.

Incentive Travel Solutions will handle all of the details of the booking, so all you have to do is make sure you pack your toothbrush and make sure you do not miss your flight that will land you in a magnificent place full of memory making moments.