The Incentive for Excellence

Incentive travel: two words that roll off our tongues as easy as our own names and, many times, with little thought. I recently was given the opportunity to obtain the CIS (Certified Incentive Specialist) through the support of SITE SoCal and my company, JNR.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, CIS is an entry-level certification program facilitated by SITE to provide a greater understanding of the theory and practice of creative and effective Motivational Programs and Motivational Travel. It was a fun experience to go through this process with some of my favorite industry colleagues, but also enlightening to go “back to the basics” of Incentive Travel and remember why we are in this profession in the first place.

The hope of all leaders who gather people for a decision-making meeting is that the collective brain power of the group will lead to a better decision. But just gathering people together in a room doesn’t automatically lead to more informed and better decisions.

In fact, very often the opposite happens: groups amplify errors. Instead of producing insight, you produce a bad meeting like what’s featured in the video below.

In this article, I examine what causes groups to make bad decisions and how you can fix bad meetings.

SoCal Continues to Attract Incentive Travel Programs

The Greater Los Angeles area stands out as a success story in U.S.-bound tourism in 2017, the last year for which we have conclusive data.

While overall numbers of visitors to the United States declined, within the first seven months of 2017, the USA had 41 million international visitors, a 4% decline from the same period in the previous year, according to the Commerce Department.

Research prepared for the Visit U.S. Coalition by the U.S. Travel Association shows that global travel volume increased 7.9% from 2015 to 2017. But the U.S. slice of that fell from 13.6% to 11.9% in the same period. That is the first drop after more than a decade of consistent growth.

However, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and LATCB President and CEO Ernest Wooden Jr. had good news to report.

On January 10^th, they announced that Los Angeles welcomed 48.3 million visitors in 2017, setting a new tourism milestone for the seventh consecutive year.

Celebrating Education

Celebrate is our word of the year! With our 20 years in existence, our strong, vibrant chapter and our outstandingly successful Holiday Event, we have a lot to be proud of and thankful for when it comes to our SITE SoCal community.