by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua Consulting | Research & Consulting, SITE

The title of this post is liberated from America: The Jesuit Review, an online platform covering matters of faith. The headline delighted me, because it called out directly something that has been bothering me about the direction of incentive travel.

If incentive travel is supposed to be an “extraordinary travel experience”, something a qualifier could never buy on her own account, then recent research on destination selection tells a bleak story: an extreme narrowing of choice, with regional and domestic locations topping the rankings across all source markets, while long-haul or exotic destinations tend to be excluded from consideration. But it is not just geography. The reward experience itself has contracted, with all-inclusive resorts consistently ranking highest.

Tried-and-tested, high-profile aspirational destinations such as Paris and Hawai’i continue to hold their own. And while “new destination not yet used” is consistently ranked much higher than any other destination typology, in practice this often means “not previously used by the organiser”. It is not an indication of Captain Kirk-like courage: “to boldly go where no man (sic) has gone before.”

So far from being an “extraordinary travel experience”, has incentive travel been reduced to something safe, sanitised and soft? A kind of corporate panem et circenses, bread and circuses?

“Attagirl! You worked hard, now here’s your reward: bottomless mimosas at the swim-up bar; gastronomic delights from around the world; bring your spouse; everything is within 250 metres of your ocean-facing suite. But don’t leave the compound.”

Champions of this model will point to the research. “This is what qualifiers want,” they’ll say. And they are not entirely wrong.

Joint research conducted this year by SITE and Maritz into inter-generational attitudes and preferences surveyed 1,000 US qualifiers across four generational cohorts. More preferred a US destination over one outside the US. More preferred all-inclusive resorts, at 45%, over city or urban immersion (20%), culture and learning (20%), or exploration and discovery (28%).

So the data is real. But there is a number buried inside it that deserves more attention.

Gen Z indicated significantly greater preference for city and urban immersion: 13%, compared with an average of 6% among the other cohorts. That gap is not a rounding error. It is a signal.

The generation currently entering the qualifier pipeline has grown up curating its own experiences, navigating cities through apps rather than maps, seeking out what is local and specific rather than globally standardised. They are not naturally drawn to the wristband-and-buffet model. They are, in fact, exactly the kind of traveller incentive travel was designed for before it forgot what it was supposed to be. And they are, statistically, the generation most likely to share what they experience. The incentive trip that gives them something genuinely surprising will travel further and work harder for the brand than one that simply gives them a good time.

Which raises the obvious question: if we design the product for the preferences of those currently winning, we may be building an offer that will feel irrelevant to those who will be winning next.

The deeper issue is that preferences are shaped by what people have been offered. If the choice presented is between a familiar resort and a worthy cultural activity at 7.30am, the result is not difficult to predict. But that is not a fair test of the appetite for discovery.

Incentive travel was never supposed to be the vacation you might already have booked. It was supposed to be the experience that opened a door rather than reserved a sun lounger. Access rather than amenity. The private palazzo over the pool party. The after-hours museum over the official welcome dinner. Something numinous, scarce, rarefied and, above all, difficult to put a price on, because the effort that earned it was priceless. It would create memories, hatch stories, not fill time. Mostly, it would leave a mark.

The best incentive experiences do not simply give people what they know they like. They introduce people to possibilities they did not know to ask for. That is what creates genuine memory, and memory is what makes a reward feel earned and worth talking about long after the tan has faded.

The Gen Z data suggests the appetite is there. The industry just needs the nerve to meet it.

Because if you are not going to get a little lost, why travel?