Corporate travel and the big picture
Using work travel to boost creativity and innovation
Historically corporate travel has been about building relationships and productivity. Progressive employers, however, are starting to use corporate travel to help improve employee wellbeing and boost creativity and innovation. You may well ask: but how?
We are all familiar with the bleisure travel boom, where employees add a personal day, or longer stay to top or tail a business trip and take advantage of the opportunity to explore a different location, either alone or joined by family, friends, or even like-minded colleagues. 36% of respondents in The Goldman Group’s Australian Luxury Traveller 2019 survey revealed they had extended a business trip to add leisure time, reflecting a growing trend across the corporate travel sector.
Today’s forward-thinking businesses are using work-related travel as a motivational tool and incentive. It’s also an opportunity to encourage employees to get out of their comfort zone and seek inspiration and innovative ideas from the destinations they visit, the experiences they have and the people they meet – inspiration and ideas that they can then bring back to their place of work.
Traveling for business encourages employees to consider new ideas and perspectives, and this is also well and truly embraced by the MICE, events, conferences and conventions sector. We are seeing the so-called festivalisation of events, transforming conferences and mass-scale meetings into multi-sensory experiences converging arts, music and culture with the corporate sector in increasingly innovative ways. Locally, events such as such as VIVID and Sydney Festival are seeing a positive response to this approach, with attendee numbers rising year-on-year as people are keen to return, often bringing new team members to experience ‘what’s next’ or ‘what’s new’ each year.
We are also seeing major innovation in the event and meeting spaces themselves, with future-focused resorts and convention centres re-designing spaces to meet demand for original ideas and venues, such as the Park MGM in Las Vegas, which features ‘high-tech, high-touch’ group spaces and The Ideation Studio, a fresh hub for brain-storming and planning that’s anything but ordinary. If this type of corporate travel doesn’t inspire employees and send them home brimming with new ideas – then we’re not sure what will!
