American Express Incentive Services is making it easier for companies to let their incentive winners plan their own individual travel awards. The St. Louis, Mo.–based company has introduced the Expeditions Card, tailored specifically for individual travel incentives. The Expedition Card leverages American Express Incentive Services' (AEIS) patented DirectSpend merchant acceptance process—which allows cardholders to spend exclusively at travel-related merchants—for items like airline tickets, cruises, car rentals, hotel or resort stays, vacation packages and more.
AEIS is emphasizing the range of choices the Expeditions Card provides its recipients. As an alternative to traditional incentive travel in which a destination and itinerary are laid out for incentive winners, the Expeditions Card aims to create similar feelings of company loyalty and motivation, but gives individuals the power to design their own outings.
The card can be used at as many as 60 merchants, ranging from big-ticket choices like Royal Caribbean International or Disney Cruise Lines, to luggage retail stores and vacation purchases booked on Travelocity. Not only can winners plan their own trips, but they can do everything they'll need for travel, soup to nuts, and do it in one spot.
"Everybody's got a different idea for what's motivating for them for travel," says Catherine McDonald, corporate marketing manager of AEIS. "As a cardholder you can select out of the groupings that are available what's meaningful for you specifically." McDonald broke it down as a difference between "sticky," or memorable, and "slippery," or quickly forgotten.
AEIS also puts customized logos and backgrounds on the cards, which connect recipients' positive memories of Expeditions Card purchases with the company or program that supplied them with the card.
"Those options really allow you, as the company, to kind of create your own currency," says McDonald. "It's something that's customizable, and that's something that makes it individually relevant for that person."
By offering a "middle choice" between too many options and too few, AEIS may help keep incentive travel rewards very sticky.
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