EVT Marketing won the award in the Most Outstanding Travel Reward Program category from the Society of Incentive & Travel Executives (SITE) for the Japan incentive experience it created for Yamaha.
This is the first significant international award to an Australian company in the incentive sector for some time.
The party was from Australia and New Zealand and had the opportunity to see Japan in a completely different light from that of the independent or package tour traveller.
Overall responsibility for the tour was EVT’s Virginia Trautwein, one of Australia’s pioneer incentive practitioners, renowned for her ability to focus on the smallest of details to ensure a smooth outcome for her clients.
EVT’s winning travel program was one element of a broader performance improvement initiative for Yamaha’s motorcycle and marine divisions in Australia and New Zealand. EVT organised for 200 of Yamaha’s top-performing internal staff and dealers from both countries to visit Japan as part of a program that bypassed the traditional leisure and cultural areas readily available in the country.
The program measured performance across a number of criteria such as standards, marketing, customer service and sales.
The 10 day trip was certainly busy, with the Antipodean visitors keen to “do” rather than see things, and to this end EVT conducted two exhaustive site inspections to rail down the program.
They were certainly on the move, with Yamaha factory tours in Okinawa, Hamamatsu (Yamaha HQ), a visit to Tokyo, and a couple of days in the snow in Sapporo.
The program was not without its challenges, Ms Trautwein said.
“In Japan, the custom is for people to travel to a destination and then relax completely. With Australians and New Zealanders the emphasis is all about having plenty of things to do. So we had to work up a wide range of activities for our guests.”
This included plenty of themed entertainment, martial arts, meditation, helicopter flights and the chance for ski lessons at Sapporo, home to the best powder snow on the planet. Finding ski gear for a group of 200 generally taller and heavier than most Japanese was a challenge in itself.
One of the highlights in Sapporo was an exercise whereby the guests were taken on a chairlift ride up a mountain, then mounted snow mobiles for a cruise down the snow to a beautiful spot where they alighted and cooked themselves a barbecue lunch, with a tiny brazier supplied for every couple. It was an enormous success.
EVT Marketing event manager, Lisa Smith, was especially proud of her team. “We not only managed to come up with the right program, but also delivered and achieved creative and cultural solutions and our traditional ‘wow’ factor,” she said.
“Our clients rely on EVT to make their businesses more prosperous by finding ways to motivate staff, consistently improve overall business performance and ensure brand strength and positioning in line with our clients’ objectives. By investing the time to understand our client’s business and provide a bespoke solution, we are able to consistently roll out effective solutions like this award-winning program.”
ABOVE: The Yamaha group settles down for a DIY barbecue in the snow of Japan.
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