Business travel doesn’t typically conjure up the most glamorous images: working-group sessions in overlit conference rooms, awkward dinners with coworkers at unmemorable chain restaurants. But for some lucky employees, there’s a special subset of work travel that isn’t just something to look forward to but something to fight for: the corporate incentive trip.
Mark, a former sales director at LinkedIn who asked to not use his real name, is a frequent flier in the world of corporate incentive travel, wherein companies motivate employees to crush their sales goals with the promise of all-expenses-paid stays at luxury hotels and bucket-list sightseeing experiences. He has qualified for seven or eight such trips awarded to the company’s top performers, including one to the Four Seasons Resort Peninsula Papagayo in Costa Rica and another to the Apurva Kempinski in Bali. “It kind of ruined travel for my wife and I, because we've now gone on so many of these trips that we know that these places exist,” he says.
His company typically buys out the entire hotel—often a Four Seasons—for thousands of top performers, who are each invited to bring along the one person they feel has most contributed to their success. (Mark, a smart man, generally brings his wife.) While there’s usually a few hours of meetings or talks one morning, the rest is actual, genuine fun: Mark remembers being skeptical of a “white party” on the beach in Costa Rica before it ended up turning into a huge rave, with everyone covering their face in neon paint and dancing until the wee hours. “It was probably one of the more fun parties I’ve ever attended,” he says.
Corporate reward or incentive travel is a common motivational tool in sales-focused jobs, particularly in the finance, insurance, pharma, and auto industries. (Multilevel marketers love them too.) It’s also a mainstay at big tech companies like Microsoft and Salesforce, the latter of which hosted Katy Perry for a private performance on its 2022 President’s Club trip to Hawaii’s Mauna Lani, an Auberge resort.
A 2014 report by the not-for-profit Incentive Research Federation showed that US businesses had spent over $22 billion a year on incentive travel, and 46 percent of companies surveyed relied on it as a reward for top performers, with sales programs using it the most. (A 2022 follow-up study correctly predicted incentive spending would grow substantially across the board.) In the past few years, as the world reopened after the height of the pandemic and tourism skyrocketed, these trips have become increasingly opulent and bespoke, with companies vying to outdo one another with five-star extravaganzas that most employees might never experience outside of their honeymoons or that one bougie friend’s destination wedding—if that.
“After Covid, things went crazy,” says Sean Hoff, the founder of Moniker Partners, a corporate-retreat-planning agency based in Toronto. Companies that had once brought top employees to nearby locations like New York City or Miami were suddenly asking him to plan excursions to Asia or the Middle East. Many of Hoff’s clients are real estate developers or brokerages based in Canada, and as the market boomed, “it almost became like a mini arms race, where different builders were trying to compete for who could offer the most incredible trip,” he says.
While companies typically spend between $4,000 and $6,000 per attendee, Moniker’s most lavish trips can cost up to $25,000 a head. One especially decadent trip to Paris for a group of real estate brokers included a stay at Hôtel Plaza Athénée, the fashion-industry hot spot once favored by Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie O, and Grace Kelly where rooms go for more than $1,500 a night. Attendees were whisked around the City of Light in 1960s Citröen CV2s; activities included a behind-the-curtain tour of the Louvre, hosted by the head curator, and a private meal in Le Jules Verne, the two-Michelin-star restaurant inside the Eiffel Tower.
Moniker also flew over a group of Realtors to Dubai and Abu Dhabi on Emirates business class ($7,000 to $8,000 per head, almost half the total cost of the trip). After a week spent skydiving above Palm Jumeirah, off-roading over sand dunes, and partying at a specially erected Bedouin-inspired camp with camels and belly dancers, the group headed to Abu Dhabi to test-drive F3 cars and watch the last F1 race of the season from a private lounge overlooking the track. “Money can get you to F1 and do these things, but you can't necessarily put together a Bedouin camp,” says Hoff. “It’s about the prestige and something that they can't get on their own.”
Nowadays, with travel influencers strip-mining far-flung reaches of the planet for content, the promise of a pool and a piña colada is no longer enough to get employees excited—they want bragging rights, too. Research shows that these trips are a powerful motivating factor for employees: the Incentive Research Foundation claims that, if properly designed, incentive travel programs can increase sales productivity by 18 percent and produce a 112 percent return on investment. They also help with “soft” goals like improving camaraderie and boosting employee morale.
Jake, an executive at a liquor distributor in Maryland, has been planning incentive trips for his company for over a decade and has personally been on trips to Ireland, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Scotland, and Barbados with his current company. “There is a lot of competition that happens at the end of the fiscal year, and some horseplay and a little bit of gamesmanship to how the sales teams manage it,” he says, noting that sales teams hide their earnings from their competitors until the last possible day to get an edge.
“You want to get there if you can, and you'll go the extra mile come the final few months of the year to get your deals across the line to qualify for it,” says Michael, a Vancouver-based sales director for a large tech company who has been rewarded with trips to Aruba, Hawaii, Cancún, and St. Lucia for being a top performer. This year he and his wife were invited to spend four nights at the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay, the five-star luxury resort in Kauai. Because he’s the father of a 6- and an 8-year-old, Michael’s vacations these days tend to be to Disneyland or a kid-friendly all-inclusive, so this perk has unexpectedly become “the one trip a year that is truly for us,” he says.
With the rise of remote work and deepening concern that robots may soon come to replace human workers, some companies are focused on making sure that when their employees spend time together, it really counts. Research suggests that AI use in the workplace increases loneliness and social isolation, with 39 percent of executives in a recent KPMG survey expressing fear that the new technology will diminish social interaction at work.
“The more AI gets involved, I think the more important it is that employees have the chance to bond outside of work,” says Gary McCreary, a hospitality industry veteran who recently started his own company called GLM Luxury Events. Currently he’s working on a reward trip for 24 people—members of an investment firm and their spouses—that starts with three days in Venice followed by eight days cruising on a vessel from the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection in the Adriatic. (The brand has been hyping its new yacht offerings lately and this summer hosted such celebrities as Martha Stewart, Tessa Thompson, Sofia Vergara, and Naomi Campbell on a lavish trip.) He estimates the trip will cost around $75,000 per couple.
“The bar is just set so much higher these days, because you have all the travel bloggers out showing these amazing inspirational places, and that causes people to want something that really has a wow factor to it,” McCreary says.
Mike May, the president of Brightspot Incentives & Events, says he has noticed a trend toward more immersive activities rooted in the local culture. “Instead of everywhere you go somebody trying to do a zip line or a catamaran, planners are looking for what's the authentic experience in that destination that these travelers could only do there,” he says. On a recent incentive trip to Sintra, Portugal, rather than booking a restaurant, he helped organize a private dinner at Pena National Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Gifts are often a perk of these trips too, and long gone are the days when companies could hand employees a branded T-shirt or water bottle and call it a day. Chardell Robinson, a VP at corporate travel agency Cadence Travel Management, says it has increasingly focused on bespoke keepsakes rooted in local traditions, like hand-painted olive oil jugs on a trip to Marbella, Spain. Often Cadence will set up a gifting suite designed like a miniature market featuring local artisans with customizable handicrafts for when employees arrive. Cadence practices what it preaches; this year the company rewarded its own top performers with an eight-day trip to Japan that featured stays in the Bvlgari Hotel Tokyo and the Ritz-Carltons in Nikko and Kyoto. Activities included making their own prayer beads at a Buddhist temple from 784 AD and a private samurai sword lesson with the choreographer for both Kill Bill movies.
Yet with travel costs rising across the board and many industries buffeted by global financial instability, some wonder if the glory days of incentive travel might be going the way of the Concorde. Business-class flights in particular, whose prices have surged in recent years, have been among the first luxuries getting snipped from the budget, multiple corporate travel agents said.
Sean Hoff notes that, after a few years of boom time, contractions in the real estate market led many of his top clients to scale back. (He also says that many of his international clients are choosing to avoid US travel right now due to concerns about treatment at the border.) Jake has seen the same thing in the liquor business: “The industry now, in general, is a little more about data points and achieving sales goals and a little less about the fun or conviviality,” he says.
Companies are increasingly thinking about the optics of these Gatsby-esque bacchanalias amid so much economic decline and uncertainty. (A Salesforce employee says the company stopped inviting massive performers after activist investors called for cost-cutting measures, noting dryly that “hiring Katy Perry and firing 8,000 employees was a wonderful combo.”)
Mark says LinkedIn has also cut the number of employees who qualify over the years—from 20 percent when he started there a decade ago to 5 percent in 2025. But even as the number of chosen ones has dwindled, the experiences themselves remain as extravagant as ever. After all, that’s kind of the point. “You can make it more exclusive, but you can’t lower the bar for the experience, because that's the thing that's motivating people to put in the work,” he says. “If it starts to become just any average trip and not some legendary experience, people will respond accordingly.”
