Rewarding your employees with travel incentives has been shown to have a lasting effect on employees and generate company loyalty that extends well beyond the limits of the trip and continues to encourage employees into the foreseeable future. Working with a travel incentive company to provide sales incentive trips to include families is a great program to booster sales and enrich employee morale in the midst of economic hard times.

During this period of economic recession, the fact that most 5-star hotels and resorts are seeing occupancy rates fall far below the normal actually sends a positive signal to businesses that this may be the best time to give your employees travel incentive trips. These possibilities are temporary in nature and will obviously disappear when the economy fully recovers. Following are the seven best ways to re-invent sales incentive travel during this time.

1. Reward employees with exceptional performance and top performance with incentive travel.

Incentive travels can still be rewarded to employees who have significantly contributed to the company’s revenues with their exceptional performance. This will motivate the employee to contribute more for the company’s gain and this will show other employees that you are rewarding honest hard labor and hopefully encourage them to give their best for the company. Perhaps the total expenditure can be lower than might be done during better times.

2. Have brain-storming sessions at appealing local venues.

Problems within an organization still need to be identified and handled. Arrange for some on-site or local venue meetings that have brain-storming sessions along with some fun activities. Allow top-performing individuals in a company to handle some of the details to encourage ‘ownership’ of both the meeting and the company’s economic status.

3. Incentive travel with business ‘field trip’ and community project.

Consider hosting employee-dominated charity events to give back to the community. It will build up the morale of your employees to be doing something positive and also enhance your company’s image in the community at the same time.

4. Take trips designed to look at ‘best practices’ in your industry in other cities.

This may be presented as an ‘opportunity’ for top-performing employees in your company to give them an incentive to work towards being part of the ‘working team’ looking at ways to improve your company’s business efficiency. It again involves employees having ‘ownership’ of their company.

5. Plan visits and tours of your branch offices and plan some brain-storming sessions.

This can not only serve as an incentive to the ‘traveling’ employees but to the ‘visited’ employees as well, giving both an opportunity to provide their thoughts on how best to bring about greater efficiency in how business is conducted in the ‘field’ and ‘at home.’ It is again an ‘ownership’ opportunity for all.

6. Visit off-shore vendors on a ‘reconnaissance’ trip to look for new ideas relating to your industry.

Plan an incentive sales trip to visit any overseas vendors to look for any ideas that could bring greater efficiency to your company as well as explore any new ideas that a vendor may have. This trip could certainly include some sight-seeing trips to gain a better idea of the local culture and economy.

7. Reward a greater number of top performers with gift certificates to local entertainment venues or events.

When none of the above possibilities seem to fit with your company’s current revenues, consider rewarding a larger number of employees with gift certificates to local entertainment venues, desired retail establishments, etc. Include it as the result of some particular incentive that most, if not all, employees could reasonably attain. This way you spread your incentive dollars over a broader section of your employees and keep your dollars ‘local’ to help that economy as well.

These seven ways may not completely work for every company’s sales incentive program. With the help of a professional travel incentive company, some of them may need to be ‘re-engineered’ to fit the needs and desires of each company’s pool of employees. They can and will provide valuable incentives to employees to keep up their good efforts and work with their company to brighten the future for both. Now there’s a real incentive!