Selling Travel 101: Incentive Travel
by John Hawks

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How can you grow your travel sales with incentive programs for local businesses?

1. Decide what types of incentive travel you want to sell in the beginning. To make things easier, you should consider offering packaged trips (cruises and tours) as incentive travel options, so that you can focus your time on selling the travel instead of building the trips. Also, you must decide whether you wish to promote individual incentive trips (given to one worker or client and his or her companion or spouse) or group incentive trips (planned for a group of co-workers and their companions or spouses).

What you decide could make a big difference in how you structure your sales efforts. For example, individual incentive trips will likely involve providing coupons or vouchers to your clients that they can present to employees who win sales contests, while group incentive trips may require you to serve as the trip escort in some cases.

2. Pick the best prospects to approach for incentive travel sales. Because you’ll be required to make personal sales calls to solicit incentive travel clients, you should start small. Pick five or six likely candidates from your local chamber of commerce directory or the Yellow Pages. Start with companies that rely on large sales forces (e.g., auto dealers, real estate brokers) or that have significant numbers of employees (e.g., factories, health care facilities). At sales-oriented companies, your target will be the person in charge of sales and marketing; in other organizations, you may need to start with the person in charge of human resources.

3. Partner with your preferred suppliers before you make the initial approach to these prospects. You’d be surprised in many cases how supportive major cruise lines and tour operators can be when they learn you’re planning to sell incentive trips to local companies! Many of these suppliers may have incentive travel presentations you can use or collateral materials such as brochures, DVDs, or sample incentive certificates to leave behind with prospects. Also, some OSSN agents have actually persuaded their district sales reps to accompany them on incentive travel sales calls! You never know until you ask.

4. Make the initial approach to your prospects. Remember that selling incentive travel is a marathon, not a short sprint! Set up an appointment with each targeted prospect, but view the initial visit as the opening move. You’ll learn a lot in these first appointments that you can use in following up later to close incentive travel sales.

5. Check your E&O coverage -- and always offer travel insurance! Make sure your professional liability/errors and omissions insurance policy is in effect, because many companies will want to know about that before they do business with you. Also, encourage your incentive clients to include travel insurance with any incentive awards as a way to shield their own companies from liability if an employee or client runs into trouble on the award trip!

One excellent resource for incentive travel is the The Society of Incentive & Travel Executives. Good luck!

(Photo credits: Holland America Line; Ritz Carlton; Riu Hotels & Resorts)