Awards. Rewards. Recognition. How do you convey appreciation for employees that have gone above and beyond for the company? If it’s taking you a long while to answer this question, then you might not even be conveying your appreciation to high-performing employees. You might even say that you pay them sufficiently enough to not have to show your appreciation. While you do have that prerogative, know that your business might not remain on solid ground for long as many other businesses are getting creative and investing in awarding, rewarding, and recognizing the best employees today. And among the options to do so, the employee travel incentive program gets top priority. In fact, the Institute of Human Resources names recent studies that have discovered the increasing value of incentive travel over cash-based rewards (e.g., increased pay, cash bonuses, etc.). It seems that non-cash rewards are getting strong favor with executives, sales managers, and other high-performing employees. This shift in reward preference is credited to incentive travel getting employee attention. Improved attention leads to increased interest and that, in turn, leads to higher performance, by as much as 22 percent for individual employees and 44 percent for teams, shares the International Study for Performance Improvement. Imagine what such employee performance can do to defeat your competitors. Such a motivating factor not only creates greater efficiency and productivity, but it also allows companies to retain the best talents. With the high cost of replacing valuable employees (WebProNew reports it costs 30 to 50 percent of an entry level employee’s and 400 percent of the specialized, high-level employee’s salary), you need to work hard to retain critical-skill workers. Incentive travel programs have the power and the track record to help your business hold on to the best talent. Now here’s an even more interesting benefit to implementing a travel incentive program in your company: Those who do not qualify can be motivated by it. A good incentive program not only rewards and recognizes the hard work of your best employees but it could also encourage the non-performers to do better so that they, eventually, qualify for it down the line. The bottom line here is that a well-developed, well-implemented travel incentive program can do your business a lot of good. It provides the right motivation. It offers cost-effective strategies to boost employee performance. And with every dollar spent on travel resulting in a $12.50 revenue increase and $3.80 in increased profits (according to a Site International Foundation study), it has the power to create bigger returns.