It wasn’t long ago that Flight Centre celebrated one of the biggest events of the year.
The Global Gathering was a monster event, with plenty of work going into making it such a success.
We sat down with global general manager of cievents, Natalie Simmons, to find out the secrets behind the Global Gathering.
What kind of creative design goes into an event such as the Global Gathering event?
The design has to reflect not only the key business messages but also a call to action for the audience. The most important thing about the design and straplines for the event is also the ability to use these throughout a 12-month period, and the various opportunities to campaign to a large and varied global audience.
Each year, the design and theme also bring the key business message inline with the destination and it is the combination of both of these that helps drive the creative strategy.
How does the success of the Global Gathering reflect on the business events travel industry?
I believe that the success of the Global Gathering is a great example of how an incentive very closely aligned to a company’s values and philosophies – and then using these as a vehicle to drive key messages over a 12-month period, continuous communication and engagement of everyone in the business globally – can help a business to grow sales and employee engagement.
The success of this event is based on the commitment from the client to drive the incentive through all levels of the business, and companies should look at an integrated events strategy within their business to create more potential for ROI.
What are key trends in business events travel moving into the future?
Business events travel in Australia has not changed greatly over the last few years. Moving forward, however, there is a growing interest in consolidation of spend. More and more we are seeing larger corporations looking to consolidate their meetings and events travel spend with their corporate travel spend, and how they can leverage their corporate contracts for better group rates.
With that, we can see more of a trend moving into implementation of an OBT for group travel, including GDS integration and this information making up part of the overall registration platform rather than the more manual process, which has been in our industry for a long time. It is an exciting time for business events and the changes that technology will bring to our industry.
How do incentives drive events and engage guests?
Incentives are closely linked to business goals, and targets provide a great ROI for both the employee and employer. A well-planned and -executed incentive strategy has the ability to engage people in the business throughout the campaign calendar and into key business messages, which are perhaps not part of the day-to-day business-as-usual process.
Incentives have the ability to take an event and its participants on a journey, and, with the right strategy, delegates arrive to the incentive ready and knowing why they are there. It makes them able to engage in the live event as soon as they get there, giving people a much stronger emotional connection, and, ultimately, they feel more connected to the business and its goals.
