Five Key Ingredients for a Successful Incentive Travel Programme Padraic Gilligan, Managing Director, Ovation Global DMC For the past five days I assisted my colleagues at Ovation Switzerland in the operation of an incentive travel programme for a US based Finance & Insurance customer. On departure day I listened with great interest as the Incentive… Read more »
Posts Tagged: DMC
Budapest is knocking on heaven’s door
“Budapest is knocking on heaven’s door” by Padraic Gilligan When the long haired buskers in the underpass are playing complex counterpoints by Bartok and Bernstein rather than “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan then you know you’re in Budapest. This is a city with a profound intellectual and cultural DNA which it carries naturally,… Read more »
Incentive Houses and DMCs: a marriage made in heaven?
For the past couple of years The Site Foundation has been conducting annual research on topics of current interest to The Meetings and Events Industry. This research released as “The Site Index” has been extraordinarily useful to the industry presenting an up- to-the-minute snapshot on a variety of topics of both generic and specific interest…. Read more »
Rooms with a View – private venues in Florence
Rooms with a View – private venues in Florence by Padraic Gilligan Italian cities, in general, don’t carry their illustrious past as a burden that prevents them from getting on with 21st century living. The past is integrated into the present sometimes seamlessly, sometimes not but, either way, contemporary life simply carries on, regardless, amidst… Read more »
The all-new Las Vegas
My abiding memory of Las Vegas rotates around Moon Civetz’s company, Maverick Aviation Group. It was during the last Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) Invitational in 1995 when the IRF was still the Site Foundation and I was on the Site Board. Site CEO Brenda Anderson had persuaded me to accompany her on a helicopter ride… Read more »
All Aboard the Marrakech Express (‘cos the Times they are a changin’)
All Aboard the Marrakech Express (‘cos the times they are a changin’)* *with a nod to some great 60s tunes! [First published on the excellent, lively, vibrant and way-cool travel portal http://www.zipsetgo.com/] In 1962 – almost 50 years ago – Bob Dylan gave voice to a new generation and announced the “times they are a… Read more »
Singapore – a curious cat and mouse tale
by Padraic Gilligan For many of us in the Meetings Industry the major dread of any trip to Asia is the knowledge that most conversations about our business will be liberally peppered with “MICE”. And we’re not talking small rodents here, we talking acronyms – meetings, incentives, congresses and events. Despite our best efforts in… Read more »
Florence – how two old friends met after 32 years
by Padraic Gilligan, Vice President, Ovation Global I visited Florence for the first time courtesy of a small bursary from the Italian Government. I was 16 years old and still at school. 3 weeks there in 1976 brought life and meaning to a plethora of exotic, rarefied names and words from Geography, History and art… Read more »
Sao Paulo – the heart of the city
“Sao Paulo – the Heart of the City” With due apologies to Ms Austen, it is a “truth universally acknowledged” that a man measures everything in relation to himself. Thus there is no such thing as big and small per se. Everything is either bigger or smaller than what you are or have yourself. I… Read more »
Istanbul –of things that are ‘past, passing or to come’
by Padraic Gilligan, Vice President, Ovation Global DMC Like most young people in Ireland, my first introduction to Istanbul came when I entered my second last year in High School. It was 1976, I was 17 and, like thousands before and after me, I was introduced to Yeats’s great poem “Sailing to Byzantium”. The first strident… Read more »