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The Bangkok Manifesto—a 10-point document on the nature, purpose and direction of incentive travel—is now available in a 40-page printed format.
The publication is the culmination of months of collaboration between the Society for Incentive Travel Excellence (SITE) and members of the incentive travel industry to define and represent their collective take on the state of the industry and create a path forward. SITE has published 5,000 copies to date.
“One of the things we were anxious to do is—in an increasingly digital world—have a print piece people could put on display in their offices,” says Padraic Gilligan, SITE chief marketing officer. “We felt that this is a discussion piece. It’s something that needs to be seen as a tangible object.”
To download a digital copy, visit motivate.siteglobal.com.
SITE’s focus is now on spreading the word about The Bangkok Manifesto, says Didier Scaillet, CIS, CITP, SITE CEO.
“Right now, what we want to do is disseminate, disseminate, disseminate,” he says.
SITE launched the report by distributing it from the booth of one of its contributors at IMEX in Frankfurt in May 2019. SITE held a press conference to promote the publication and asked its members to share it with their employees, clients and stakeholders.
“We don’t want it to just sit on a shelf,” Scaillet says.
Many of the contributors focus on the deeper purpose of incentive travel in their writing. As Steve O’Malley, HMCC, CITP, division president of Maritz Travel, notes in the introduction, “Our industry transforms business and people through the event experience. Through our collective work, we have a significant impact on the communities we serve, the companies who utilize incentive travel as a performance improvement tool and the guests that take part in the experiences we design and deliver.”
Says Gilligan, “It’s big picture. It’s aspirational. It is in the pursuit of the ‘why?’ It’s finding very compelling reasons why someone might continue as an incentive travel professional as opposed to doing something else. There is value in it beyond the travel experience. It is truly transformative. It is also transformative in the destination where it takes place and for the relationships it potentially creates.”
SITE has already started planning a Vancouver Manifesto, to be created when the organization holds its next global conference, Jan. 24-27, 2020, Scaillet says. It will build on The Bangkok Manifesto but include amendments and updates, as well.
“We’ll go back to the general session and say, ‘These ideas are among the 20 percent that may have changed since the last Manifesto,” Scaillet says. “The whole idea is to really make this a living document. We want to go deeper.”
The Bangkok Manifesto emerged when SITE held its Global Conference in Thailand in January. Prior to the conference, members of SITE’s International Board of Directors, trustees of the SITE Foundation and a group of global experts involved in incentive travel met in invitation-only workshops to come up with 40 statements about the nature, purpose and direction of incentive travel for potential inclusion in The Bangkok Manifesto.
“When the board would meet, whenever we would get into the ‘why’ questions, we lacked a reference piece that might in some way represent our vision for what incentive travel was and for where it was going,” Gilligan says. “That was the impulse that led us to figure out what we could do to create that vision piece.”
Using a crowdsourcing exercise and the online audience engagement platform Slido, the collaborators narrowed the list to 26 points at the conference, under the guidance of Martin Sirk, former executive director of the International Congress and Convention Association and now the owner of the strategic consultancy Sirk Serendipity in the Netherlands.
The points in the manifesto cover a wide variety of topics, including corporate social responsibility, the economy and teamwork. Ten global experts shared their thoughts in 300- to 500-word essays in the report.
“We did further work on top of that,” Gilligan says. “We then took each of the essays and researched what they were saying and traced references to business magazines, industry publications, online academic journals and so on. Each of the essays is annotated with references. Each has its own additional further reading recommended. It’s a very substantial piece of work and goes beyond opinions or viewpoints. We found people making statements about incentive travel and company culture. You realize how company culture is more and more about the search for a higher purpose and how travel can feed into it.”
Many of the points in the Bangkok Manifesto address subjects that are top of mind for meeting professionals today. The first point in the report, for instance, focuses on social responsibility: “Every stakeholder in the incentive travel community should embrace social responsibility as a core part of their business philosophy and recognize that our business practices and policies will define how that responsibility is exercised.”
In an accompanying essay that she wrote on the topic, Denise Naguib, vice president, sustainability and supplier diversity for Marriott International Inc., writes, “As communities face increasing challenges related to scarcer natural resources, shifting weather patterns, overtourism and the negative impacts from disposable culture, travelers around the world have no greater responsibility than to consider how they can address solutions…incentive travelers have a unique opportunity to realize that power by experiencing the destination while mitigating negative impact.”
Inclusivity is another key topic in The Bangkok Manifesto. “Inclusivity should become a critical concept for our industry—we believe that incentive travel changes behavior and builds motivation at all levels of an organization,” notes the report.
Carina Bauer, president-elect of the SITE Foundation and CEO of the IMEX Group, wrote the report’s essay on the topic. “Travel is, by its nature, one of the best ways to foster cultural sensitivity, and increasingly immersive incentive travel programs that incorporate authentic destination experiences are one of the best ways of fostering understanding and building empathy,” Bauer writes.
Some of the topics look at bringing economic opportunity to destinations that sometimes miss out. With interest in second- and third-tier destinations up 91 percent in 2018, relative to first-tier destinations, the Manifesto declares, “Our industry must encourage more second- and third-tier cities and non-urban destinations to embrace incentive travel as part of their business mix, highlighting that success in our business is not dependent on massive infrastructure or investment.”
As Tony Lorenz, CEO of PRA Business Events, put it in his essay on the topic, “Smaller, consumer-centric destinations deliver authentic and unrivaled content, places and one-of-a-kind experiences at an attractive price point.”
Pointing to attractions such as Nashville, Tenn.’s music scene; Lake Tahoe, Nev.’s majestic mountains; the “beautiful beaches and chill vibes” of Tulum, Mexico; the labyrinth alleyways in Marrakesh, Morocco; and the equestrian and bourbon artistry in Louisville, Ky., Lorenz notes that “niche destinations readily stand apart in their value proposition to incentive program stakeholders.”
Some contributors also look at the economic case for incentive travel. “Incentive travel contributes significantly to economic growth, partnerships within and between organizations and innovative thinking by both participants and the organizations that create the programs,” the report points out.
Sebastien Tondeur, CEO of MCI Group, explains that in an era increasingly shaped by AI, robots, the internet of things, quantum computing and automation, “Incentive experiences will win the human capital engagement game. By bringing people from all around the world to many places all around the world, real people in real places will connect, grow and perform.”
When SITE moves ahead with The Vancouver Manifesto, it plans to add additional research behind it, such as focus groups and testimonials, Scaillet says.
“We believe each and every one of the statements in the report on its own would suggest a body of research,” he says. “We also need to collect far more data.”
SITE is considering issuing a video or white paper with an “aha!” moment or salient point regarding a statement in the report to spread its message about incentive travel.
“We believe there might be misperceptions out there within the industry—certainly within the larger business events or MICE industry and certainly within the corporate world and wider society,” Scaillet says.
Authenticity is a trend that will continue to be discussed, he says.
“People really want to live unique experiences,” Scaillet says. “We see, increasingly, second- and third-tier destinations being chosen. One reason is cost. Another is people want something new. They’ve all been to the major hubs and major destinations. It’s, ‘Bring me to Slovenia or places I have not been to.’ For all these reasons we feel our industry is evolving.”
The strength of incentive travel is that it brings about an encounter where the traveler has to step out of his or her comfort zone and get to know another culture, Gilligan says.
“It’s taking the discussion around incentive travel way beyond profitable performance,” he says. “Incentive travel happens because it’s an organizational tool that helps companies to improve performance and strengthen the bottom line, but if we stop the discussion there, we do ourselves a disservice. We don’t key into the much more long-lasting benefits there are. That’s what we have been doing.”
