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Things that make Incentive Travel Programs Successful for Business

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Over-water bungalows in Bora Bora, Tahiti

Over-water bungalows in Bora Bora, Tahiti

Many corporations have already realized the benefits of incentive programs, but some are reluctant to participate, for fear the program may not be a success.  Understanding how the programs work can quickly alleviate any apprehension. An incentive travel trip acts as a motivational tool to improve productivity and achieve business objectives. Such programs allow participants to earn a travel reward based on a specifically defined level of achievement set forth by the company. The following are essential elements that work together to form the core foundation of a successful travel program:

  • The earning and selection criteria for the reward are clearly tied to business objectives.
  • Communication about the program and the progress participants are making toward goals is clear and consistent.
  • Detailed records are kept that both follow and prove the productivity of the earners and their contributions to the company’s financial performance.

Additional components that lend to the success of an incentive travel program include the open recognition of earners, networking opportunities for top performers so they can build relationships with both colleagues and management, collaboration between top performers and management concerning best practices and business ideas, and maximizing the motivation of current and potential future earners through the promise of a future continuance of the incentive travel program.

The following has been proven to be a direct result of a company’s promotion and provisioning of incentive travel programs for top earners in its respective business: the growing of a more positive organizational culture, the positive influence stemming from employee recognition throughout a business, the ability of a business to retain its top performers, rather than losing them to a competing company, and the sustaining of an employee’s drive to accomplish and exceed set individual and companywide objectives.

One of the strongest benefits an incentive travel program has on a business is its overwhelmingly positive influence on business culture. Employees most often respond very positive to recognition and being rewarded for a job well done. In addition, incentive travel programs boost employee competition. Moreover, though some may see the following as a potentially disastrous effect, the colleague competition, as it pertains to incentive travel programs, have resulted in positive gains for a business, and most often, those colleagues competing against each other often resulted in all of the competitors maximizing quotas, achieving goals, and more people qualifying for the opportunity to experience incentive travel programs firsthand.

As you can see, there are many components that make incentive travel programs successful for businesses – so many that it would be wise for your company to look into providing incentive travel programs for your employees.

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Incentive Travel Trips Deliver Exotic Foods to Match the Destination

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green mango salad in thailandOne of the best experiences involved in traveling to an exotic location is the opportunity to taste several different local foods. If you are lucky enough for the chance to go to a French Polynesian country, those wonderful and beautiful places serve a variety of unique, one of a kind tastes and treats that will have your taste buds craving for more. French Polynesian countries, including Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, and even the Tuamotu Atolls are specific destinations that boast the absolute best in exotic foods, which you and your family (if you have one) can partake and savor. After the first bite of the local dishes, you will immediately come to understand why savoring the flavors of these island locales is one of the “must do” activities. Traveling to a location like Tahiti, may seem out of your league, but if your company offers incentive travel trips, you may just be headed there. Continue reading, and you will get an idea of what awesome dishes you can expect in Tahiti on your next incentive travel trip through Incentive Travel Solutions.

  • Seafood: A Tahitian diet staple is fresh fish, especially from such fish as tuna, mahi-mahi, and grouper. You can also taste more exotic lagoon and deep sea dishes, including parrotfish, barracuda, octopus, and sea urchin.
  • Poisson Cru: The national dish of Tahiti, it is a South Pacific twist on ceviche. Poisson Cru consists of raw red tuna marinated in a splendid and aromatic blend of limejuice and coconut milk.
  • Hima’a: Almost every South Pacific culture uses an underground oven to prepare traditional feasts. In Tahiti, locals typically prepare traditional feasts on Sundays, which are cooked in baskets woven from banana leaves over hot rocks in a big ground hole called a hima’a. The menu will consist of Chicken Fafa with coconut milk and spinach, fish, suckling pig, shrimp, lobster, banana, breadfruit, taro, and yams.
  • Pineapple: Tahiti is famous for its growing of sweet and juicy pineapples, which is unlike anything you can purchase from your local supermarket.
  • Coconut: Locally known as the “tree of a hundred uses,” coconut palms are the sustenance life source of Tahiti. Tahitians use coconut for so many food preparations food preparations, and even beauty products. You can replenish yourself with coconut water, which is great for rehydration after being in the hot sun; experience coconut milk, which is used as a marinade; and devour coconut flesh, which can be eaten raw, or grated and cooked into coconut rice and coconut bread).
  • Breadfruit: Known in Tahiti as “uru,” this starchy, vitamin-rich fruit is normally eaten as a side dish after being cooked in a hima’a.
  • Taro: Probably less familiar to most Americans reading this blog, the Taro plant is valued for both its large, arrow-shaped leaves, which is called “Callaloo” in the Caribbean, and its starchy root. In Tahiti, Taro leaves are used in soups and stews, while the root is used to make fried chips and creamy pudding, which is called po’e.
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Choosing the Best Exotic Location for an Incentive Travel Program

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incentivetravelHow to choose the best exotic location for an incentive travel program depends heavily on what a person’s personal definition of the word “exotic” is. When most people think of an exotic location, they think of tropical islands that have never been heard of. The truth of the matter is that everyone’s definition of “exotic” is subjective, meaning one person might think a tropical island is exotic, while another might think that a hard to reach, mountainous terrain with heavy snowfall is exotic. Choosing the best exotic location for an incentive travel program relies on the evaluation of the corporate executive responsible for putting together the program and issuing the incentive to the company’s employees. Therefore, if a company wishes to choose the most popular overall opinion of the best exotic location to send its employees deemed worthy of its benefit, they can opt to have a vote on the type of location where everyone should go. As an example, the company can have a vote to see how many more people prefer going to a warm, beached filled destination versus traveling to a mountainous location where snowboarding and skiing is considered the best in the world. In this manner, at least the majority will be satisfied.

Another way to go about choosing the best exotic location for an incentive travel program is the person in charge of putting this together for his or her business can contact an incentive travel company, such as Incentive Travel Solutions, and find out the types and availabilities of locations to where employees who are rewarded this benefit can go. This way, employees can get a specific virtual tour of each city or location, as well as what these places have to offer and what can be expected when arriving at the destination and spending time there. Contacting an incentive travel expert is a great ideas because they can give you specific facts as to whether a location will be tropical alone or perhaps include a city within a country rich with culture and sights.

Alone with location details, a representative from an incentive travel company such as Incentive Travel Solutions, can tell you which destinations and locations have been the most successful and rewarding, or which places are the most popular to which to travel. This way, you can avoid the back and forth that may come from providing several options to your employees, plus it will give you a solid idea of which vacations have been the most enticing, exciting, and rewarding for other businesses and employees.

Incentive Travel Solutions can help your business narrow down the options available concerning the locations your employees can be sent. An abundance of information will be made available for the locations offered through the incentive travel programs, which will help whomever is putting this all together for your company pinpoint the best place that will appease the masses.

Corfu Island, Greece at Sunset

Health & Wellness in the Workplace – Would an Incentive Travel Trip fit the Bill?

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incentivetravelThe growing concern for health and wellness of employees in the workplace has made the implementation of corporate wellness programs into the work environment a recent trend. The concern over a worker’s health effects businesses of all sizes, as the size of a company does not negate or influence the amount of stress an employee might have. Therefore, businesses are working towards integrating wellness strategies and programs to create an overall health enhancing work experience, along with introducing incentive programs in order to increase the participation and awareness of employees that can benefit from corporate wellness programs, but might be reluctant to do so. The pursuit for innovative ways to maintain a worker’s interest in wellness programs is now considered crucial because health and wellness of a workforce is proven to directly influence a company’s bottom line.

When incorporating health and wellness plans in the workplace, the addition of an incentive trip could be the perfect supplement. Stress is a significant factor in every employees well being and one of the best ways to reduce stress is to escape from your daily routine to an exotic location. Along with reducing stress, a recent internal survey showed that over ninety-three percent of responders agreed that incentive travel rewards improved their overall satisfaction with their company. The conclusions related to the surveys have led to an increase of businesses seeking out incentive travel programs through companies like Incentive Travel Solutions. It is now believed this is a certified method of improving health and wellness in the workplace, which directly leads to improved production.

It is a safe bet that almost everyone reading this blog will agree that sitting behind a desk at work all day, every day, is not conducive to one’s overall health and wellness. This is why it is important to give the human body and mind a well deserved break in order to recharge by engaging and participating in a relaxing trip to an exotic location. The introduction and continued provisioning of incentive travel trips tells a workforce that their employers are serious about concerns for the company’s overall health and wellness, and it encourages and demonstrates how taking time to get away and to de-stress is valuable part of work life, just like eating well, and exercising. In addition, business health and wellness programs have proven to directly effect the lowering of health insurance premiums for a company due to having healthier, more productive employees.

Finding ways to relax and escape the daily routine are difficult for most workers. Having a company offer a trip that an employee might otherwise not afford, grants an opportunity to relax and have the experience of a lifetime. The best part for businesses, is that incentive trips are easy to plan when you have a company with the experience and expertise in group travel.  The professionals at Incentive Travel Solutions can assist businesses of any size with information regarding incentive travel trips, and how these trips are a perfect idea for improving your employee’s health and wellness in the workplace.

Isn’t Half the fun of Vacation the Food?

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incentivetravelThere are so many reasons why people love, crave, and clamor for a wonderful trip to an exotic destination. While most of the popular reasons for wanting to experience an exotic destination for a vacation have to do with tropical locations, beach atmosphere, fun in the sun, sun tans, or perhaps even huge accumulation of snowfall that amounts to the best powder for skiing and snowboarding, there is one reason that might be escaping your thoughts, but you surely enjoy when you get there: the food. People get a chance to experience local, cultural dishes from places all over the world that you might never find back home. Everyone loves food, and most everyone loves to try food from other places in the world that has special cultural ingredients, including herbs, vegetables, and fruits that might be hard to come by back home. Some people actually plan an entire vacation around a location only because of the type of food that can be found there. For example, this writer lives on the south, and a lot of people come to visit this city for only one specific reason, and that is to eat at a particular restaurant (which will not be named) because it offers “deep south, traditional southern soul food.” If people are willing to take their whole family to this southern city to eat fried southern food, imagine what other people who have exotic tastes would be able to experience if they got the chance to travel to a part of the world where the cultural food is considered the best in the world?

For all the food lovers out there who’s dream it is to be able to travel to a location somewhere in the world where you believe the food would be absolutely delightful, but might not have the resources to put the trip together on your own, perhaps it is time to take this plight to your boss. Yes, you read the last line correctly – it is time to tell your boss to look into an incentive travel company that provides information on locations all over the world, many of which have the best dining experiences of anywhere you can possibly imagine. Inceincentivetravelntive travel companies, such as Incentive Travel Solutions, offer a method of rewarding a company’s best and most successful employees with options for travel destinations around the world. How it works is simple: First, the company head agrees to offer incentive travel solutions to a choice number of employees who are deemed worthy to receive this one of a kind rewards service, then a company like Incentive Travel Solutions provides information of places that can be chosen as destinations.

Half the fun of a vacation is definitely having the opportunity to consume food that you will most likely never find back home. Through Incentive Travel Solutions, food lovers employed by generous owners will now have the opportunity to go to those places you may have never thought would be possible, but soon, it will become a most wonderful reality. Bon appetite!