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Beyond Short-Term Vision: Preparing the Business Events Industry for an Unpredictable Future

by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE There are two terminals now at Dublin airport as annual passenger numbers rush headlong towards a controversial 40m. Like many “legacy” airports, it’s a sprawling campus, with extensions, new wings, spurs and satellites added over the years to deal with the dramatic exponential growth. If you’re on a Ryanair flight, your…

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SITE at Fontainebleau, Miami Beach - where two classics collide

by Pádraic Gilligan, Founder of SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Since its triumphant debut in 1954, Fontainebleau Miami Beach has had more work done than your favourite Instagram influencer! We’re talking body contouring, tummy tucks, augmentations, Brazilians—you name it. Not to mention the countless facelifts. Yet, through it all, its original curves, as envisioned by modernist…

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Why not start the incentive travel program in the destination and ditch the air?

by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE For many years now, the Incentive Travel Index (ITI) has been unveiling fascinating insights into the evolving landscape of incentive travel, shedding light on its current state, underlying motivations, and potential future trends. Traditionally, its annual report has focused on core themes such as industry growth, budget…

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New Incentive Travel Opportunities for DMOs

by Pádraic Gilligan, Founder, SoolNua Marketing & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Incentive Travel Research In the latest Incentive Travel Index1, buyers once again highlighted their preference for “new destinations not used before” as the top choice for future incentive programs, a trend that mirrors the results from 2023. This preference isn’t just a fleeting fancy—it was chosen twice as often…

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Lessons from ethical retail for incentive travel professionals

Pádraic Gilligan, Founder, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Incentive travel professionals learning from others I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by how much we can learn from business professionals outside of our own bubble. I remember buying a car a number of years ago from a Toyota dealer and immediately incorporating some of her brilliantly subtle sales techniques into my own…

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Leading or being led? Client relations for incentive travel professionals today

by Pádraic Gilligan, Founder, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Incentive travel professionals should adopt a consultancy approach, addressing critical issues like sustainability, to lead the industry forward and align with evolving stakeholder expectations and corporate practices. We are incentive travel professionals Google may have transformed us into amateur diagnosticians, yet when…

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Incentives on the edge: St John's, Newfoundland

by Pádraic Gilligan, Founder, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Stay Strange St John’s I saw a t shirt in the window of one of St John’s many independent retailers that said: “Stay Strange St John’s”, a variation on the inspirational “Keep Austin weird” tagline. Following my week in Canada’s most eastern provincial capital, I’m saying St John’s is neither strange nor weird but, in…

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"To infinity and beyond!" - in memoriam Didier Scaillet.

by Pádraic Gilligan, Founder, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE “To infinity and beyond” was a saying that Didier often used during his tenure as CEO of SITE when I served as his CMO. It’s half quoted in his last post on Facebook, from Christmas day, 2023 when he says “Merry Christmas to all my loved ones … and beyond”. Thinking about that in the aftermath of Didier’s death makes me…

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Is it still raining in Gleneagles? My first visit to Scotland's incentive masterpiece

by Pádraic Gilligan, Founder SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Gleneagles – an incentive travel classic As July unfolds in Ireland and the weather gods continues to think it’s March, I’m left wondering whether it’s still raining in Gleneagles, that “glorious playground” that my son Colm and I visited earlier this year? Despite my decades in the incentive travel industry, prior to our…

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The way we travel now - implications of latest McKinsey research for incentive travel

by Pádraic Gilligan, Founder, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Recent research from McKinsey into the way we travel now is crammed with exciting, actionable insights for organisers of incentive travel programs. While the McKinsey research focuses on leisure, the trends here tend to replicate themselves in incentive travel as, after all, the travel reward is specifically designed to…

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Incentive travel - what we can learn from children

by Pádraic Gilligan, Founder, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE This post explores the “Growing Up in Ireland” study, highlighting how travel is the top aspiration among 13-year-olds, especially girls and those from higher-income families. It underscores the importance of travel experiences and offers insights for incentive travel professionals on gender and socio-economic trends. Growing…

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Building & Bridging Cultures with SITE in Sydney

by Pádraic Gilligan, Chief Marketing Officer, SITE & Founder, SoolNua Marketing Sydney, a true destination Sydney is not a first-tier global hub like London, Dubai or Singapore. There’s simply not enough international traffic going in and out of the city. It’s an offline city, too physically far from London, Paris, or New York to have direct connectivity. While news is instantaneous in our…

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Back in Abu Dhabi to visit the Abrahamic Family House

by Pádraic Gilligan, Managing Partner, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Returning to Abu Dhabi Returning to Abu Dhabi, I had the opportunity to visit the remarkable Abrahamic Family House, a testament to the city’s visionary development since my first visit in the early 2000s. Back then, the grand Sheikh Zayed Mosque was the primary attraction amidst a landscape dominated by construction…

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Why we need to re-framing and re-positioning incentive travel

Pádraic Gilligan, Managing Partner, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Recently I posted on sustainability and incentive travel concluding that current definitions / understandings of each rendered them as irreconcilable opposites – sustainability was “limiting”, requiring restraint, reduced consumption, thoughtful, conscientious behaviour while a travel reward was sans frontiers and sans…

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Can sustainability itself serve as the reward for incentive travel qualifiers?

Pádraic Gilligan, Managing Partner, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE In a recent session at IMEX Frankfurt, I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion with fellow business events professionals Irina Graf (The MICE Blog), Gregory Baur (Zurich Convention Bureau) and Marvin Zemp (Luzern Convention Bureau). The focus of our session was on aligning event objectives with…

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Communicating what's good about Business Events - Policy Forum at IMEX Frankfurt

Pádraic Gilligan, Managing Partner, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE Business Events: a USD$1.6 trillion industry Last May the Events Industry Council published the latest iteration of its Global Economic Significance of Business Events and valued business events’ contribution to global GDP at USD$1.6 trillion. This figure, in fact, would rank business events as the 13th largest economic…

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Incentive travel is changing, but is it changing fast enough?

by Pádraic Gilligan, Managing Partner, SoolNua & Chief Marketing Officer, SITE More questions than answers Last year at SITE we celebrated the 50th anniversary of our formation in 1973. One takeaway for me after a golden year of celebrating incentive travel excellence was the realisation that, in 50 years, incentive travel hasn’t really changed that much at all. And that, of course, posed the…