Incentive Planners Need to Get Better at Justifying ROI

The measurements that planners use to prove the ROI of their incentive travel programs are not what finance and procurement executives are looking for.

New research from the Incentive Research Foundation and Explori found that while 87% of executive leadership and senior management value incentive travel, just one in three incentive planners believe that finance and procurement see the value.

That’s because a majority of incentive program owners (54%) rely solely on ad hoc and anecdotal measurements.  

It’s just not enough hard evidence, experts say.

“The incentive industry needs to move beyond proving people had a great experience and get better at proving what changed because of it,” said Stephanie Harris, IRF president.

Fewer than one in four planners track ROI, profit impact, customer growth, or pipeline generation — even though increasing sales revenue and commercial performance is the overarching goal. Learning, capability, or behavior change outcomes are also rarely tracked.

Changes in leadership could make this CEO-CFO gap even greater, if new leaders who are less familiar with their companies’ incentive travel programs are more skeptical about their value.

Closing the Gap

The report found that the reason many planners are not scientifically measuring their events is that they lack the tools and training to do so. As a result, attendee surveys focus on the experience itself — things like location, hotels, agenda structure, and networking opportunities.

Among the roadblocks planners identified as stopping them from measuring program effectiveness are the lack of agreement on KPIs (35%), lack of understanding of how to measure outcomes (33%), and lack of stakeholder buy-in (30%). External incentive agencies reported that client restrictions about sharing internal information were the main thing holding them back. 

“There is demand for more practical measurement support, such as frameworks, playbooks, benchmarking, KPI definitions, case studies, and implementation guidance,” the report concluded.  

Another challenge is timing. While two-thirds of incentive owners tend to report on travel program performance results within a month, only 8% said they would typically expect to see measurable impact from their programs within a four-week period.  

They are under pressure to report an impact which hasn’t yet had the time to materialize.  

Program owners are aware of these challenges: Only 36% said they were “fairly/very confident that their approach accurately isolates the impact of their incentive travel programs.” A quarter (27%) said they were not very confident or not confident at all.

Other incentive travel research, such as the Incentive Travel Index, has explored the use of hard vs. soft measures, but this is the first survey designed specifically to get a clearer view of the CEO/senior leadership versus finance/procurement gap, said Harris.

“Cost has always been easier to measure than value,” she said. “But the current budget environment and increased scrutiny from finance make the need for credible business-impact measurement more urgent.”