The MSAR is an ideal location. So say international tourism and travel experts. Strategic location, diversity of entertainment offerings and high numbers of events are to the city’s advantage.
A strategic location, diversity of entertainment offerings and high numbers of event organising professionals make Macau an ideal destination for incentive travel events, according to international tourism and travel experts.
With the purpose of offering supplementary training to local tourism and event professionals, Macau Meetings, Incentives and Special Events Association (MISE) organised a Certified Incentive Specialist – CIS Certification Programme on September 13 and 14, held at the Macau Trade and Investment Promotion Institute (IPIM) offices, with the department also subsidising the payment of two incentive travel industry leaders to serve as instructors on the course.
The Certified Incentive Specialist – CIS Certification Programme acts as an entry level certification programme from the Society of Incentive Travel Excellence (SITE), a global community of incentive travel professionals.
“It’s the first time such a certification event has been held in Macau. We wanted to run an education programme on meetings and incentive travel and bring it to our members and industry players,” Rebecca Choi, Vice-President of MISE, told Business Daily.
The event involved 30 tourism professionals and event organisers from the territory, with one attendee coming “all the way from the Philippines”, the MISE Vice-President said.
Choi added that the education programme was an opportunity for local “industry professionals and stakeholders to acquire key knowledge and start developing new approaches to further market Macau as a destination for incentive travel”.
Let the best one travel
The event focused on investment travel incentives: the reward through travel of employees or customers for achieving high levels of performance or customer loyalty, with travel and events sometimes being organised by independent incentive travel companies.
“These are award trips with the most common being for sales or purchases. For example, an insurance company will reward an agent for achieving certain levels of performance. It can be to reward employees or customers,” said Bruce Tepper, Vice-President of business consulting group Joselyn, Tepper & Associates, Inc. and speaker at the event.
For the first half of the year, a total of 628 Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Events (MICE) events were held in the city, of which 586 were meetings and conferences, whilst 22 were exhibitions and only 20 were incentive events, according to Statistics and Census Services (DSEC) data.
Incentive events attracted 25,000 attendees to Macau in the first six months of 2016, representing 4.2 per cent of the total 588,000 MICE attendees in that period, according to the same data.
Betting on attracting incentive travel was considered a profitable bet by both speakers, considering it to be the “highest end in terms of financial reward travel”, with incentive travel trips “normally being held at 5-star hotels and offering top quality service, unique experiences and private events using private facilities”.
Fernando Compean, one of the speakers and owner of travel and incentive companies Avanti Meetings and Mundo Editorial, S.A de C.V., told Business Daily that incentive events tend to spend more money than other type of event but that it’s a demanding sector in terms of what it will get out of the investment.
Award city
In order to become an attractive destination for incentive travel the speakers considered that a city needs to be affordable, offer diverse entertainment and lodging options, have destination appeal and possess local support infrastructure, factors they considered were already present in Macau.
Tepper, an expert speaker on the issues of tourism, meetings and incentive travel, sees Macau as having an “enormous potential” as a travel incentive destination, due to its strategic location and entertainment offers.
“I was chatting with one of my clients in Malaysia, who runs a very large travel agency, and he told me that Macau is becoming a major incentive destination for incentive travel market, since – due to its close location – he could organise two or three events a year,” Tepper told Business Daily.
The business incentive expert noted how Las Vegas had built a successful incentive travel market after realising “not everyone wants a casino” and started developing the outdoor recreational side of its tourism market, suggesting a similar approach for the city in its goal of diversifying the local economy and making it a MICE centre.
Make them come
When questioned on the high dependence upon government support of local MICE events, both experts stated that generally incentive travel companies avoid any kind of government dependence.
“Incentive and corporate travel companies don’t usually look for government help or any type of benefits; we want to try to control everything regarding our programs and the experiences participants are going to have,” Compean told Business Daily.
For Tepper, Macau has enough to offer that, while maybe attracting initial incentive travel groups could require government help, in the future it wouldn’t require state support.
“This is an industry where people plan well in advance, so creating these events might translate into business in a year or two years. People are getting familiar with the city and I see a time where government help won’t be and shouldn’t be necessary,” Tepper said.
The travel industry expert considers that government help could come in another way, since one of the aspects incentive travel organisers look for is unique events.
“I would like to see Macau make more unique government building facilities available for events. I attended one of the annual conferences held by SITE in Ireland and the final gala dinner was in the Presidential Palace in Dublin. As an individual traveller I can’t book a room in the Presidential Palace so having events like that are important,” Tepper told Business Daily.
Competing with Hong Kong
Compean goes as far as to say that with the new properties in Cotai and the completion of the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge the territory could start competing with its neighbour in terms of MICE events.
In the first quarter of 2016, there were some 314,000 overnight MICE visitor arrivals to Hong Kong, more than double the number of visitors Macau welcomed for the sector in the same time period, according to Hong Kong Tourism Commission data.
“You have new hotels and you’re building a bridge to Hong Kong that will be paramount to incentive travel events and any kind of event because you have shortened the distances between Mainland China and Hong Kong to here. Most international groups would arrive by Hong Kong airport for sure. Therefore, I think you can be a very good competitor of Hong Kong,” Compton told Business Daily.
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Source: Macau Business Daily
Author: Nelson Moura
Date: 14/09/2016
Link: http://macaubusinessdaily.com/Macau/Shaping-Future