by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua Consulting

Europe-bound North American incentive travel programmes are on the rise. That was one of the clearest outcomes from the Incentive Travel Index 2025. Ranking in 4^th position in 2024, Western Europe ranks in 2^nd in 2025 for US, Canadian and Mexican buyers, in both cases behind the Caribbean, the solid location of choice these days for North Americas with its combination of short duration airlift, in-vogue all-inclusive resorts and easy to sell sun/sand/sea appeal.

That Western Europe is on the rise at all is somewhat counter-intuitive given the geo-political tensions that have been in play since the re-ascent of the current administration in the USA, although it’s also fair to say that some of Western Europe’s rise is due to a spike and proliferation in Canadian programmes diverted out of the USA!

m&i transatlantic, rode the crest of this wave, bringing 80 North American incentive buyers to meet an equal number of European suppliers in Vienna, Austria, a storied city with more than its fair share of sizzling destination appeal. I was privileged to be invited as a keynote speaker on “What’s in the mix for 2026?”, a data-rich presentation on the changing face of incentive travel. Based on the proliferation of questions posed during the presentation, I think it went down well, overall.

The trip re-acquainted me with a top tier European capital and, surely, one of the region’s most fully integrated business events or “MICE” locations, offering best-in-class solutions for corporate meetings, incentive travel experiences, city-wide conventions, events and exhibitions.

m&i transatlantic was hosted at the Hyatt Andaz, a stunning Renzo Piano designed glass and steel structure that’s in the middle of one of Vienna’s flagship “new city around the station” projects. The “Quartier Belvedere” is pitched not as an extension of baroque Vienna but as its counterpoint: clean-lined contemporary architecture, LEED‑certified office and hotel buildings, and a curated mix of uses that keep it populated beyond office hours, illustrating Vienna’s strategy of layering modern global‑city functions right up against its historic core.

There’s no beige predictability about the Andaz, its public spaces an eclectic excitement of pop art, digital pieces and big unframed abstract canvases. The meeting spaces on the first floor are airy and light-filled and the guest rooms have floor to ceiling windows and highly intuitive digital functionality. The wardrobes are fitted with shoe horns and inbuilt valet stands and there’s Nespresso and robes and complimentary Manner Neapolitans and Almdudler in the mini-bar – everything you might expect as a road warrior, sprinkled with a little local flavour.

Exit the Andaz, walk a mere 100m and, already, you’re immersed in Imperial Vienna, at the Belvedere Palace, its upper and lower buildings separated by a magnificent Baroque garden in the French formal style laid out with terraces and parterres. I’m there on a beautiful spring day in late February and its all flash and bustle of early tourists and busy locals, many using the garden as a short cut to their next meeting. With limited time, I decide on the Klimt exhibition, a permanent fixture of the Upper Building and, suddenly, I’m draw into Vienna 1900, the eponymous city’s fin‑de‑siècle modernist culture (c. 1890–1914) when it produced groundbreaking work in art (Klimt, Schiele), architecture/design (Wagner, Hoffmann), music (Mahler, Schoenberg), literature (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal) and psychoanalysis (Freud).

And this is where the narrative shifts.

Because while the Caribbean delivers brilliantly on restoration — warmth, ease, reward, the exhale that follows achievement — cities like Vienna remind us of something else entirely. They remind us that incentive travel, at its most powerful, is not just restorative but transformative.

There is nothing superficial about sun and sea. The human spirit needs lightness. It needs horizon. It needs the uncomplicated pleasure of sand between toes and a shared cocktail at dusk. For many qualifiers, that is exactly the right reward at exactly the right time.

But cities offer something layered. They offer context. They offer story. They offer intellectual and emotional texture. Within 48 hours you can move from a contemporary LEED-certified district built around a rail hub to a Baroque palace garden, and from there into the radical artistic rebellion of Vienna 1900. You can dine in a restaurant shaped by centuries of culinary evolution and wake the next morning in a building that’s all architectural ambition for the century ahead.

That layering matters.

Because incentive travel is not simply about reward; it is about memory. And memory attaches most deeply to moments that surprise, provoke, expand or reframe.

A private viewing of Klimt’s The Kiss.

A string quartet in a candlelit hall.

A guided walk that traces Freud’s intellectual footprints.

These are not just programme elements. They are narrative anchors. They embed the destination into the personal story of the traveller.

For in a world that feels fragmented and transactional, the destinations that resonate most are those that allow participants not only to relax — but to feel enlarged.

*With due thanks to Billy Joel for the title!

There are other posts about Vienna on this blog but let me direct you to this one. It’s a fictional account of a real event that I was privileged to create with my great friend, Paul Eder, formerly of Protective Life.