The geography of business tourism has significantly expanded recently
In addition to various exhibitions, enterprise tours, congress trips, and business travel for resolving various issues, business tourism also includes incentive tours. The geography of business tourism, including incentive tourism, has since remained largely unchanged.
In terms of the number of awarded tourists, the USA holds a leading position. Their share is more than 60% of incentive groups of business people arriving in Europe. The expenses of American companies on incentive trips for employees, compared to costs on material motivation, are increasing every year. In addition, the duration of incentive tours is also increasing. Great Britain, Mexico, and Asian countries are the most popular and preferred destinations for incentive tours.
Despite the decrease in the number of group trips since the early 1980s, they still remain a priority segment in the market of this type of business tourism. The number of employees going on a trip varies from 1-2 people to a hundred or more, but the most popular groups are those with no more than ten members. Groups include middle and top managers, executive staff, as well as consumers of the company's products – for example, regular customers or buyers.
The growing popularity of incentive tours has led to the expansion of the congress and exhibition activities. There arose a need for special thematic events: forums, programs, trainings, seminars; and the organization of training centers for effective preparation of specialists in this segment of business tourism.
All this contributed to the emergence of numerous associations and communities, one of which is the organization SITE (Society of Incentive Travel Executives) – a society of business people in the field of incentive tourism. It officially has 650 members. SITE is located in New York and includes about 18 committees, a university for training specialists, and also organizes seminars, exhibitions, conferences, and other thematic events.
According to experts, this area of the tourism business will actively develop in the future and will become a basic form of employee motivation in large companies.