5 Steps for Planning an Insurance Incentive Travel Event

Identifying one or two specific goals will help you plan an itinerary and strike the right balance of fun and business.

3. Selecting Theme and Destination

Analyzing your audience and identifying your objective will help you select a destination and start designing a theme. For example, if your goal is to build brand loyalty with a group of super high-performing independent agents, you would want to choose a destination that seems more exclusive and luxurious, such as Tahiti. But you also want to make sure the resort you pick has conference rooms available where you can educate your agents on your brand.

Selecting a theme for your event makes the prize specific and desirable. If I told you the reward for meeting your performance metrics was a trip to Hawaii, your image of that trip might be a little bit vague. But if I told you that the reward was a luau-themed event at a resort on the beach, complete with fire dancers, volcano tours, a traditional pig roast, and optional surf lessons, you can picture yourself there. Choosing an effective theme makes your incentive travel rewards feel more immediate and makes it easier to promote your program.

4. Building the Itinerary

Time is limited, so it's important to structure your incentive travel event for maximum value. You'll want to provide a balance of planned activities and free time, personal time and professional time, and create events around exciting set pieces that tie in with your theme and create the chance for shared experiences. Doing so will ensure your agents enjoy their reward, while your brokerage is able to achieve its objectives and build important relationship capital.

5. Repackaging This Year's Event for Future Marketing

As you're planning your event, start thinking about how you can repackage content from this year's trip to make subsequent trips even more successful. If you can show the agents who didn't qualify for this year's trip what they missed out on, they will be motivated to put in the extra effort to make sure they're included next year. For the agents who did attend, you'll want to remind them what a great time they had, so that they will be inspired to keep up their high levels of performance.

You might consider passing out souvenirs to the attendees, which they can display on their desks, or designing branded and destination appropriate t-shirts for the occasion. You can include details of the events in your next internal newsletter or create a poster to hang up in the office. Additionally, this sort of collateral can be used for enticing potential hires. After all, who wouldn't want to work for an insurance brokerage with a phenomenal incentive travel program?

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Mark Herbert is president and chief executive officer of Extu. He has managed about $60 million in incentive travel awards.