FICP Executive Director Steve Bova, CAE, offers some insight into the challenges and trends facing this industry in the coming year.

Every town has something about it that visitors can’t find anywhere else. Here are 10 destinations that understand how to capitalize on what they have.

All-inclusive resorts offer a full range of restaurants, activities, gyms, spas, shopping and, in many cases, excellent food. Meeting rooms are adjacent to the resort, there is no need to leave the property, making it easy on the event planner to keep all of the activities contained in one space.

Many meeting and event planners within the financial and insurance arena understand the issue of stage fright. That’s because in this industry, where presentations are extremely common, planners often need to work with speakers on delivering a solid presentation that keeps the audience coming back for more.

The evolution of corporate teambuilding over recent decades has made planning these activities easier.

Here are some destinations that appear custom-designed to incentivize, along with info from some of the industry’s key, in-the-know players.

When they’re not engaged in sessions, meeting participants can enjoy gaming, whether that means dabbling with a new experience or returning to a favorite activity.

Guided by such parameters as goals, budgets, demographics and destinations, the lengthy and detailed procedure is demanding and sometimes overwhelming. But it need not be.
Armed with the following input from in-the-know players of some of the nation’s top DMCs, the future for theme-plotting planners can be simple. So relax, enjoy the process and find inspiration in the words of Albert Einstein: “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

There are many instances of short-term partnerships with suppliers that qualify as a success. A firm running an incentive trip, for example, may partner with a DMC at the destination, receive great service and never work with that supplier again — only because the firm never happened to repeat that destination. But the most salient examples of successful relationships with suppliers are those where the client receives great service over many meetings, i.e., the long-term partnership.

Planners wage a never-ending battle against Murphy’s Law, which says that what can go wrong probably will. That’s why it’s rare that events proceed completely flawless from beginning to end. Events typically can survive minor slip-ups, some of which attendees may not even notice. But big blunders can ruin an event or make attendees so […]