Incentive trips from Asia helped make 2017 a successful year for meetings. Even though meetings and incentives are not listed separately in the facts and figures, such business trips from Asia are a good indicator for the incentive business, as they are almost always counted as incentive trips by companies given the long travel distances involved.

 

Tourism turnover from the Asian meeting markets China, India and South East Asia has more than doubled over the past five years.

Two points in particular contributed to the success in the Asian meetings and incentives area: “Experts from Switzerland Tourism have worked intensively in this area in India (see Alkem Laboratories report), China and South East Asia since 2014. In the meantime, turnover has grown”, explains Barbra Steuri-Albrecht, member of the Executive Board and Head of Meetings & Incentives at Switzerland Tourism ST and Switzerland Convention & Incentive Bureau SCIB (German). “In 2017, we focused on companies with offices in multiple Asian countries that had already awarded an incentive trip to Switzerland. We developed partnerships with these companies.” This campaign started to bear fruit in its first year: incentive trips offered by companies Manulife (2015 from Malaysia and India, 2017 from Indonesia and the Philippines and 2018 again from Malaysia) as well as AIA (2015 from Singapore, 2018 from Thailand, 2019 from Indonesia and Malaysia).

Incentive trips that create a lot of value

Investments in the incentive market pay off, as demonstrated by the Meetings Report 2016 (published every two years), as incentive trips are strongly influenced by service and individual benefits. This area therefore creates particularly high value and is lucrative for the events sector. So growth in this area is particularly pleasing. Furthermore, this type of business travel can highlight Switzerland’s appeal as a tourist destination, increasing the likelihood of these guests returning as individual travellers in the future.

Facts and Figures
Meetings   2017 2016
Budget CHF m 7.7 7.2
Share of total budget % 8.2 7.8
Tourism turnover CHF m 88.7 81.9
Visits to MySwitzerland.com/meetings   305 403 274 006
KAM-generated overnights   266 457 246 042
Number of meetings, events & conferences   792 797
Number of quotation requests processed by SCIB   1 470 1.479