Category Archives: Sales Rallies

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Corporate Incentive Travel: How to Request Proposals

Corporate Incentive Travel: Requesting Proposals (RFPs)

by Anne Thornley-Brown M.B.A., President
Executive Oasis International

This post is inspired by what has been landing in our inbox as well as recent conversations with other incentive travel houses, team building providers and event planners.

The following scenario is becoming more and more common.

  • A member of staff sends an e-mail requesting an urgent quote
  • The information provided is at best sketchy.
  • When the prospective supplier responds and asks clarifying questions, may times the e-mail is never answered.
  • Early in the process it becomes clear that the person making the inquiry hasn’t got a clue about objectives, the purpose of the trip, budget, or what is to be included.
  • At other times, there is a delay and to expedite the process, we send out a short document with a couple of options and request feedback about which are of interest so that we can prepare a full proposal
  • Typically, there is no response or a reply that they are awaiting feedback. Feedback to obtain very basic information takes weeks or months. Often, it is never received

Once a proposal has been submitted it turns out that either:

  • the budget is significantly lower than what was indicated
  • no budget has ever been allocated
  • no authorization had ever been given for a trip and the person making the inquiry was just being “proactive” based on what happened last year

The initiative is scrapped or put on hold. Sometimes, the whole process is stalled at the starting gate. Basic information is never provided and the prospective client vanishes into the stratosphere. This scenario happens so often that suppliers have invented for the term “falling off the face of the earth”. It’s poor business etiquette and it reflects very badly on a company when employess display it.

I would be interested in some feedback as to what is going on in corporations that is creating this scenario.

  • Why are the employees who are tasked with obtaining quotes given only minimal information?
  • Why is there such a delay in providing even the most basic information?
  • Are companies no longer briefing employees about basic etiquette for dealing with prospective suppliers?

Since these scenarios are becoming more and more prevalent, I decided to prepare a guide to how and when to request proposals for incentive travel.

You’ll also have access to a free downloadable tool to assist you in pulling together the information needed when requesting quotes for sales incentive trips, team building, sales rallies, and other corporate events.

When to Request a Quote

It’s really quite simple. Request a quote when:

  • A member of the senior management team has given authorization for a sales incentive trip
  • A budget has been approved
  • The company is in a position to make a decision within 5 – 10 business days of receiving the quote
  • Alternatively, there is a clear and specific procurement process with definite timelines, checkpoints, and decision making criteria


Information Basics for Incentive Travel Quotes


I realize that some of the information we’re covering in this blog entry is very basic. Unfortunately, it may be basic but it no longer seems to be common practice. I’m not sure why and can only guess that maybe people are so overwhelmed with heavy workloads that they’re cutting corners. As a time saving tool and to assist you in pulling it all together, we’ve included a downloadable:

Free Incentive Travel RFP Planner[.DOC]


When requesting a quote, the following information is essential.

  • Group Size
  • Purpose of trip (i.e. strictly recreational to reward the team, combination of business and recreation)
  • Preferred dates (minimum of 3 options)
  • Preferred destinations (all of them)
  • Objectives/ Expected Outcomes
  • Is facilitated team building to be included? This will require 2 – 3 days plus an orientation.
  • Class of accommodation required (i.e. 4 star, 5 star, 6 star, 7 star
  • Double or single occupancy
  • Is the group open to a night of camping out?
  • Are tours required?
  • Is a gala or awards dinner required

In addition to this, it is also helpful to know what the company has done in the past so that there is no duplication in the proposed options.

RFP Best Practices: A Matter of Courtesy

Once a decision has been made it is extremely important to contact everyone who submitted a proposal to:

  • Inform them of the decision
  • Provide feedback about why they were not selected

It is never acceptable to just disappear. The provider must close the loop with all of the venues and suppliers they contacted on your behalf.

Follow-up

Once a company has gone through the time and trouble of preparing a proposal, expect to hear from them with updates about once a quarter. It is certainly not acceptable to delete e-mails without reading. If circumstances change and the company no longer requires incentive travel services, politely contact the service provider, inform them of the change in status and ask to be removed from the distribution list.

Dealing with prospective suppliers in a less than professional manner, reflects poorly on your company and will, over time, tarnish its image and hurt it’s reputation in the marketplace. When all is said and done, this all comes down to common sense and common courtesy. Unfortunately, these commodities don’t seem to be less and less common and that’s unfortunately.

For more information, also see:

Executive Oasis International is a Toronto based management consulting firm that offers incentive travel and team building retreats in Canada, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, and the Caribbean.

Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg

Photo Credit: S.C. Asher

Photo Credit: Muffet

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Malaysia Incentive Travel: August in Asia

 

 

Incentive Travel: Asian August – Cooling off in Malaysia

During the summer, temperatures soar in South East Asia. Savvy CEOs in the region have discovered a number of cool and picturesques destinations in Asia to beat the heat and offer memorable sales incentive trips, executive retreats, and team building. Malaysia offers a number of places where your team will be cool and comfortable even in August.

Pahang

First let’s start with a virtual tour of Pahang where you’ll find the communities of where you’ll find Cameron Highlands, Berjaya Hills, Fraser’s Hills, and Genting Highlands.

 

 

Cameron Highlands: Temperature: 15°C – 32°C

I’ll never forget the first time I went to Cameron Highlands. On the way, we stopped at a beautiful waterfall. There was an area with stalls, arts, crafts, blow pipes and a variety of souvenirs. The people working at the stalls were pulling up on motorbikes and some were talking on cell phones.

When we continued our journey, I asked the guide about aboriginal peoples. I said “When I was in Kuching, there were aboriginal settlements nearby. Are there any aboriginal people in this area?
He replied “You just spent time with some Orang Asli. They were the people selling at the stalls”. I guess the blowpipes were a big hint. Never let motorbikes and cell phones throw you off.

On the way to Cameron Highlands, your group has the option of stopping at Kuala Woh Recreational Park for a short scavenger hunt that includes orienteering and a visit to by suspension bridge to the museum to answer trivia, a dip in the natural hot springs and light snacks.

 

 

Cameron Highlands was a real treat. We stopped for lunch at a boutique hotel. An impromptu site inspection and tour revealed spacious rooms and ample meeting room facilities. The Smokehouse Hotel, that has been providing hospitality since 1932, is a possible lunch (or dinner) venue for your group upon arrival in Cameron Highlands:

 

 

We headed off to visit a handicraft centre, gardens and nurseries. We toured at tea plantation and relaxed while we enjoyed tea, scones and an incredible view. I noted that to round an itinerary for your corporate group, in Cameron Highlands, golf, nature hikes, a visit to an Orang Asli (aboriginal) village, and jungle trekking are available.

Before heading back to Kuala Lumpur, we stopped and picked strawberries. It was my last day in Malaysia and I have a very late night flight. As soon as we were airborne, it was a treat to enjoy the fresh strawberries I had picked with whipped cream that had been provided to me at no charge by one of the restaurants in the airport’s departure area. It’s one of those moments in time that you wish you could freeze.

 

 

Berjaya Hills:

Formerly known as Bukit Tinggi (meaning “French Hill”), Berjaya Hills has a French themed resort, beautiful gardens, golf, paintball, horse riding, and a variety of options for team meetings and relaxation.

 

 

Great views – Narration in Arabic

 

There is even a Japanese garden complete with teahouse. Yes, you can experience a traditional Japanese tea ceremony in the heart of Berjaya Hills.

Japanese Garden Walkthrough

 

 

Nearby, even in the summer, the weather will be comfortable enough to treat your team to a full jungle survival team building experience with overnight camping. The location is popular with local companies so it is imperative that you book your trip at least 4 – 6 months in advance if you want to include this unforgetable experience into your itinerary.

Fraser’s Hill:

 

1,524 metres about sea level, you’ll find Fraser’s Hill, a rainforest hamlet named after Louse James Fraser from Scotland who established a trading staion in the area and went missing in 1919, is a picturesque destination where the temperatures are cool enoug for for retreats, even in the summer.

 

 

It’s ideal for companies that are interested in providing an eco-tourism experience. It is one of Malaysia’s prime locations for bird wartching. Groups can also enjoy golf, horse riding, the Jeriau Waterfall.

 

 

 

Genting Highlands: Temperature 22°C – 32°C

 

 

Enjoy the unforgetable view as cable cars will carry you above the clouds to Genting Highlands, a playground complete with hotels, meeting facilities, a theme park and casino. Horse riding can be arranged nearby.

 

 

Sabah

Kinabalu Park

In Malaysian Borneo, Mount Kinabalu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Asia’s tallest peak, will give your team an opportunity to explore rocky mountain and the rainforest trails below the mountain. With one of the most diverse collections of fauna in the world, Kinabulu Park covers 4 climatic zones.

 

 

Even if your team is a mix of serious mountain cimbers and team members who would prefer to cool off under a waterfall, soak in the curative properties of an open air sulphuric bath, and explore tropical gardens, there will be no shortage of things to do and experiences to amaze.

Golf, and early morning horse riding are also located within easy distance.

Those who dare, can even walk The Torque, the highest via ferrata in the world.

 

 

Let Executive Oasis International Take You to Malaysia


In Malaysia, we can add facilitated business team building and recreational activities ranging from orienteering, jungle treks, and ziplining to mountain climbing and abseiling to your itinerary. No matter what area of Malaysia you select for your summer adventure, one thing is certain. There is so much to see and such a variety of habitats and adventures to explore, your first trip to Malaysia will not be your last.

 

 

For more information the adventures that you can enjoy in Malaysia during the summer and throughout the year, please visit our website:

Photo Credit: NTlam – Cameron Highlands (Top)

Photo Credit: JoChoo – Fraser’s Hill

Photo Credit: xiquinhosilva – Genting Highlands

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Are incentive travel programmes appropriate for companies that have experienced downsizing?

Incentive Travel After Downsizing

Are incentive travel programmes appropriate for companies that have experienced downsizing?

  • Has your company recently gone through downsizing?
  • Are you thinking that, under this scenario, an incentive travel programme would be inappropriate?

Your top performers need to have their efforts recognized now more than ever. This is probably one of the worst times to cut your incentive travel programme.

If you’ve recently laid off workers and your organization is leaner, employees that remain behind face some significant challenges. Everyone will have to have to do more with less and work a lot harder to achieve results, particularly in a turbulent marketplace. Some employees who remain behind will feel discouraged, demoralized and afraid of the possibility of futher layoffs. You don’t want your top talent to jump ship.

It is, therefore, PRECISELY at this time that companies need incentive travel programmes to reward top performers who produce outstanding results despite the challenges.

Investing in incentive travel is most important during stressful times and they will have a higher payback and measured bottom line impact (e.g. retention of top talent, lower risk of turnover, improved morale). It is one of the most leveraged investments a company can make during turbulent times with no downside. Incentive travel pays for itself out of the increased revenue that your team generates.

You can offer incentive travel even if you are facing budget constraints. Here’s how:

  • Instead of going overseas, stay at a local resort or hotel.
  • Opt for a smaller property
    There are even small inns, lodges, timesharing units, and resorts where your team can have exclusive use at a fraction of what you would pay to stay at a large resort.
  • Take top performers out for a nice dinner and have them and their spouse stay for 1 night at a local spa in your city
  • Stay at a local 4 star resort instead of a foreign 5 star resort.
  • Rough it

    There are affordable options like campsites, dude ranches, and summer camps in off-season

So, instead of asking:

  • can we afford incentive travel?
  • can we justify an incentive travel programme at this time?

Ask:

  • how can we afford to shelve our incentive travel programme when the members of our team have to work a lot harder to achieve results and they really deserve recognition for their extra effort?
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Incentive Travel: Reversing the AIG Effect

Incentive Travel & Event Planning: The AIG Effect - What Caused it & How Do we Reverse it?

by Anne Thornley-Brown, President, Executive Oasis International

It’s been almost a full year since my article “Should companies cancel incentive travel during a recession?” was printed in Incentive Magazine. In view of more hotel closures or bankruptcies that have recently been announced in Las Vegas, it’s  to re-visit this issue.

These issues are vital and have a direct impact on the economy. Please tweet about this article, link to it, reprint it, Stumble Upon it, and share it with every executive you know. Please also share the other articles and resources that I have listed. Please add your comments and join the conversation in the Q & A section on LinkedIn.

As we all know, a dramatic chain of events has had a devastating impact on the business travel, hospitality and team building industries.

What in the world were they thinking?

At least Morgan Stanley took the high road.

Morgan Stanley Won’t Entertain Clients at Its PGA Tour Event

We all know, what happened next.

The Reaction

Some of my colleagues blame statements like this by Obama for the problems that followed:

I see it differently. I agree with my colleagues that there is an important role for sales incentive trips, luxury corporate events, and recreational events for teams. However, I think that Obama definitely “hit the mark” when he said that the companies that accepted the TARP bailouts had no business planning lavish trips and corporate events. I believe that Obama, other lawmakers, and the media were justified in their comments and that they should not be blamed for the troubles that have plagued our industry. In fact, I have been sounding the alarm for years about:

  • companies behave as if they are country clubs and recreational centres rather than businesses
  • companies that opt for strictly recreational events as placebos and pacifiers rather than bonafide business team building to get to the root of the problem and generate solutions when they are having trouble
  • companies trying to pass off entertainment and recreation as “team building”

It’s a matter of remembering why we are in business, balance and priorities. I have been cautioning that an eventual backlash would come and we would see severe cutbacks in this sector. This is one time I wish I was wrong. The scenario that has unfolded is even worse than what I predicted.

The White House made its support for business travel clear:

So it is hard to understand the way in which some companies with a solid bottom line have responded to the criticism of AIG and other TARP fund reciplients. In a knee-jerk overreaction, even companies that are doing well and that had earned the right to reward their people have hit the panic button & cancelled incentive travel and retreats.

One of the most mind-boggling decisions in recent months was AXA’s decision to cancel its overseas incentive travel programme for the next 2 years in the same week that it received recogniition for its outstanding performance. Despite solid performance:

Axa Life head of events Patti Heaven, says: “From the perception of the greater general public, financial institutions are viewed very much in the same way as banks, which are not enjoying good media coverage. To host overseas incentives together with big production conferences in this global economic climate would create the wrong image. This would be insensitive and could potentially be interpreted as a lack of respect for individuals that have been made redundant.”

Sorry, I don’t get it. It certainly sounds like AXA events were WAY over the top and needed to be scaled back:

Heaven’s first foray into the events world was taking a group of 60 plus partners overnight to a hotel down the road. It was so successful that in the following years the event was held in Amsterdam, then Switzerland, Monte Carlo, Mauritius, the US and Bangkok.

“They just kept getting bigger, and more frequent,” says Heaven. ” And now there’s all kinds of different events every year, from conferences to product launches to overseas sales incentives.”

Events run by Heaven have always had an edge of excitement. She once found herself in trouble with Florida police after a mix-up with
passports as ID at a Miami nightclub. “I grovelled so much I made Uriah Heep look like Osama Bin Laden,” she says. “They loved it. Everything was fine then.”

Other stand-out events – but this time for the right reasons – include a recent incentive to Venice where the group had a private tour and recital at St Mark’s Basilica. “The tour was divine, although it was 35degC and we were all in black tie – tourists were taking photos of us,” she recalls.

“But the recital was electric. The room was dark except for candles. The music was extremely atmospheric. It was an amazing experience – it reduced some grown men to tears.”

Patti, what in the world were you thinking? A backlash to this type of excess was inevitable. However, to go from one extreme to the other – overkill to cutting incentive travel completely is a clear case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It makes absolutely no sense.

If anybody reading this is in touch with AXA executives or Patti Heaven, please share this blog with them. They are welcome to give their side of the story. I hope that someone from AXA will answer the following question that I throw out to executives from all companies that have decided to scale back despite the fact that they are doing well:

How do you expect the economy to ever recover if you don’t spend money and if you make decisions that are contributing to the deminse of many organizations?

Please don’t think I am just picking on AIG and AXA.  In one of my other blogs, I  have previously written about some of  the bizarre ways in which companies were spending money on recreational activities and passing them off as “team building.   The problem with corporate excess is that there will ALWAYS  be a backlash and innocent people eventually have to pay for the poor judgement of executives by losing their jobs.

The Consequences:

The latest:

Since we released this article, there has been another one:

Luxury hotels like the Ritz-Carlton have suffered from the backlash from the so-called “AIG effect.”

Just days after the federal government committed $85 billion of taxpayers’ money to a bailout of insurance giant American International Group (AIG) in September 2008, senior execs from the troubled company headed to the swanky St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach for a week of wining and dining of 100 top salespeople.

The uproar was deafening.

“The whole demonization of luxury meetings and companies’ pulling back on having their high-end meetings in luxury hotels–. this has had a tremendous impact on Las Vegas,” Ritz-Carlton spokeswoman Vivian Deuschl reportedly said.

Last year, revenue for U.S. luxury hotels fell nearly 17 percent, outpacing the 14 percent drop in the overall industry, according to an analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC. Revenue per available room, a fiscal measure of health in the industry, plummeted about 24 percent, compared with a 16.4 percent drop for the industry overall.

Deuschl did not comment specifically on the Ritz-Carlton Las Vegas occupancy levels, other than to say it is lower than the company would like, but she did have an opinion about the ripples from the AIG effect.

Fallout in Canada

The AIG effect does have an impact on companies in Canada and around the world:

Still think AIG effect has no impact on Canada?

Here is the latest:


  • Inn at Manitou Closes Doors After 36 Years (Ontario)
    • Reversing the AIG Effect

    A Landmark study has revealed the ROI of business travel so there is no justification for companies that are doing well to continue to put the lid on spending in this area.
    PERFORMANCE LEVEL: Are overseas incentives bouncing back?

    It was the poor judgement of some corporations that triggered the AIG effect. It is the selfishness, short-sightedness and cowardice of other corporations that is prolonging it. Sound decision-making and decisive action can reverse the AIG effect.

    The time to act is now! So here is the bottom line:

    • If your company is in trouble, don’t schedule a luxury junket or corporate event. Instead, hire a consultant and have an on-site team building or brain storming session to generate solutions to your business challenges

    Here are some ideas and guidelines:

    • If your company is doing well, don’t cancel your incentive travel programmes or retreats.

    Ideas & Resources

    How to Add Value to Your Meetings & Other Complimentary Resources

    Let’s stop this madness before we do permanent and irreversible damage to the global economy. Your team has worked really hard, beat the odds and generated outstanding results. They deserved to be rewarded. Let’s learn from excesses of the past, reward teams and expess appreciation to clients in a way that shows good judgement.  At a time when there are so many in need at home and abroad, devote part of your sales incentive trip or retreat to a project that gives back to the community. Help boost the economy and save jobs by booking a sales incentive trip or retreat today.

    I join the following organizations in urging executives from companies that are doing well to reactivate their incentive travel programmes before even more hotels go bankrupt, more employees lose their jobs and companies in the hospitality and business travel industry are forced to close their doors for ever.

    Great minds think alike. It looks like this blog entry is timely. Just saw this in the current issue of Forbes:

    AIG Effect

    Executive Oasis International is a Toronto based consulting firm that helps organizations succeed even in the midst of turbulence. Core services include consulting and on-site facilitated business team building and off-site team building reatreats. They also offer incentive travel and corporate event planning to help organizations reward their people when business objectives have been achieved.

    You are welcome to reprint this article as long as you keep the by-line intact and ensure that all links are live.