The pursuit of pleasure combined with work 

In times of looking down, paying attention to the social media and smartphones, TMI MICE offers people an opportunity to look forward and upward. We have been working with Incentive Trip organization for 10 years and recently, in our brand repositioning, we noticed a decisive market transformation for the next decade. Greater appreciation of Learning Trips, or Technical Trips. 

Consolidated for about 30 years, Incentive Trip segment works with big companies focusing on its pure and simple aspect, which is the leisure trip award. Companies have their sales team or distributor network, which achieve the determined goals and gain a trip, with the purpose of taking the winning team to travel and have fun. 

Over time, this dynamic was evolving, there was an agglutination of interests and Learning Trips emerged, adding leisure and technical learning contents at the same time. 

This is the trend that has been set in the last years, with an understanding that the format of simply rewarding a team and taking it for a ride has been exhausted and content needs to be added to that experience. 

TMI MICE realized two issues: That many companies needed to renew themselves to keep up with the market as a whole, as well as the political and economic aspects of Brazil that have peaked in the freezing of budgets in the last years, initially promoting funding cuts in marketing and investment services, precisely in incentives. Companies did not stop investing in these aspects, but considerably reduced expenditures. In the awards, national trips are sponsored again, in place of international trips, for example.

Within this movement, some industries, such as purchase or cost control, become more active, take on a larger body within organizations, allied to the internal strengthening of compliance policies, not allowing expenditures understood as unnecessary or unrelated to the corporation business. From then on, the trend of investments in incentives and awards is to promote labor content. 

Not that it was not done before. Agribusiness, for example, is a sector that has always opted for more technical trips, but now this trend is very strong in other sectors. 

Here at TMI MICE, we have seen this change in behavior with most of our customers in the last years, and since then we have increasingly focused on meeting that particular demand by renewing our perspective with new projects, partners and content.

Is it the end of Incentive Trips? 

Of course not. Incentive Trips still work very well as awards. Market studies have always indicated that no recognition can be compared to the tourism experience that an Incentive Trip proposes. It is considered the award that brings happiness the most, remaining in people’s memories much longer than any other type of award, while recognition as products and money is soon forgotten.

Our experience at TMI MICE and conversations with our competitors, however, point to a trend for companies to choose to add value with technical trips. Particularly, I see this as the future of our market. 

It continues…

Rodrigo Fragoso | CEO 

---

Image by Colton Sturgeon via Unsplash