Room for improvement

I thought that perhaps some people were confused about why their events are organised — surely they are rewarding and motivational. Anyway, whatever the true situation I take my hat off to the meetings and conferences people with a whopping 68 percent and 66 percent response respectively compared to incentives with 39 percent of respondents saying it was in their job function, being even outranked by product launches and team building both on 47 percent. Now let's look at what lies behind all the numbers. The respondents are predominantly based in Hong Kong and Singapore so responses must be read with this in mind. China set to outperform Thailand Let's first look at Thailand, here is a country well represented in the respondents to the survey and receiving the highest overall score and incentive segment score as the most popular destination in 2004, but wait what's happening in 2005. China unseats Thailand and pushes a few other well known destinations down a notch or two on the way through. It will be interesting to see if China can deliver on the promise in the same way Thailand has done for incentive groups. My feeling is China is more than ready for the conference, meeting and exhibition market. However, delivering a world-class incentive product like Thailand might be a stretch in some parts of China, indeed almost anywhere outside Shanghai and Beijing. That situation won't take long to rectify itself, and I am sure China's aspirations for inbound incentives won't stop at the 2005 year in the survey. Looking at Hong Kong and Singapore, they are the two outstanding examples of where we have city destinations with almost no resort product or new attractions that can still pull in big numbers as an incentive destination. These cities are able to retain and build incentive market share based on limited new product. I can only attribute this to the number of world-class hotels in both cities that truly pamper incentive programme qualifiers with their 6-star facilities and services, a good lesson for some other aspiring city incentive destinations. I feel very sorry for the Philippines, with just 3 percent going to the destination in 2004 and no increase in 2005. Here is an incentive destination that is going to waste due to economic and security issues. I have been a big fan of this country since the 1970s. In those days the Marcos regime was in power and the tourism infrastructure investment being made was unmatched by most other destinations, without getting into politics it is a pity the momentum in tourism terms has been lost. While on the 'basket cases' of the survey, what happened to the Pacific Islands? Here is one of those cases where the combination of poor product awareness and poor air connections combines to keep them out of the running, certainly from the respondents in Asia. Turning to the sources of business, it is quite clear that the predominance of multi-national corporations in certain locations drives spend. Since Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, China and Australia are the clear leaders in driving business, naturally they are also on the receiving end of a lot of business. These countries as a source market may indeed be where the decision maker and therefore purchasing is coming from, but I suspect the actual attendees may be more region-wide. It certainly reinforces the need to have strong representation in these locations if you are planning to sell to these customers. Finally, let's look at the survey itself; I think this is incredibly useful in terms of charting the buying habits of the industry. I also think it can act as a 'wake-up call' to marketers and operators catering to the CEI segments. Clearly the facts revealed in the survey about issues like security of a destination as a deciding factor can't be ignored. I would urge the next survey to have respondent numbers and industry and interests spread proportionally across all markets in Asia Pacific. Getting cooperation from potential respondents must be a potential nightmare — perhaps they need an incentive programme to encourage participation.