Businesses are getting really creative in their marketing efforts during these economic hardships our nation is facing. Retail clothing stores have been seen to offer customers a 3-day, 2-night stay at a Las Vegas hotel for the first 100 customers who come to their store, with no purchase required. The same retail store also ran a second promotion where if a customer were to spend $ 100 at the store, they would enhance their Las Vegas hotel stay with two round-trip airline tickets. Car dealerships are advertising free 2-night hotel certificates in many resort city destinations for customers who simply come in for a test drive. When the customer purchases a vehicle, they upgrade their hotel stay to a 7-night cruise for two to the Bahamas or the Caribbean. Vacation certificate incentives can work for virtually every industry.

Real estate agents are using vacation certificates to attract more potential buyers to their open houses. Insurance agencies offer vacation certificates to clients if they request a free estimate. Then they update customers who buy policies. With vacation certificate incentives, you can create employee recognition and loyalty programs, customer retention programs, referral programs, customer loyalty programs, lead generation programs, customer recognition programs, and more. When a business uses incentives in conjunction with their existing advertising and marketing efforts, they can see a 30% increase in response rates to existing ads. Vacation incentives help businesses attract more paying customers from their existing marketing efforts and from their referral and repeat businesses.

Vacation certificate incentive companies can be found by going to Google and entering the keywords vacation certificates or even vacation incentives. You will find hundreds of companies to choose from. All companies should know that 99% of these holiday certificate incentive companies work on a business model called “break”. The “break” works like insurance. Insurance companies charge you a monthly fee, hoping you never go to the doctor. These vacation certificate incentive companies do the same and charge you between $ 1.00 and $ 150.00 per certificate. They do not have actual contracts with hotels, cruise ships, airlines, etc. But instead, only get the commissions every time you book a customer on a vacation at the published standard rate (the same rate you find on Expedia or Travelocity). Let’s say you buy 100 7-night cruise certificates at the current rate, which is around $ 30.00. You just paid $ 3,000.00 to give a vacation certificate to 100 of your paying clients. The travel agency takes $ 500 out of the $ 3,000.00 and pays a commission to the sales representative. Then they take approximately $ 500 and put $ 2000.00 in a reserve account to pay for the vacation when their clients try to redeem the vacation certificate. The problem is, $ 2000.00 is not going to cover 100 7-night cruise getaways for two. They trust only a small percentage of their clients to redeem the vacation certificate, just as an insurance company ensures that policyholders never go to the doctor. When they run out of money to pay for vacations they make excuses to their clients telling them that the requested travel dates are not available and ask them to resend the dates over and over again only for their client to give up in the end, which can create unnecessary customer service problems for your business.

Can you imagine having to come out of your pocket to pay for all the vacations that your business promised, all because the travel agency you paid $ 3000.00 to stops fulfilling the requests of your clients? Now, once you’ve satisfied customers by talking negatively about your business and worse, it’s not even about the product or service you’ve provided. What if it happens to the wrong customer? Can you imagine having to deal with a lawsuit because a client who loved his business 2 years ago wants the 7-night luxury cruise that he promised?

Cruise ships, hotels, resorts, and other travel establishments are rarely fully occupied during major holidays and weekends. So what they do is they directly hire certain incentive marketing companies that fill their empty rooms. When hotels, resorts, etc. Having empty rooms is basically a waste of a good room. They would rather have someone stay in the room for virtually free in the hopes of earning some income from their shops, restaurants, room service, spa, and if it is in Las Vegas, their casino where they make all their money. Vacation certificate incentive companies that work with this model are hard to find, but they do exist.