Ms Dass added that more factors have to be considered when planning a company-wide trip, such as air tickets and hotels, as well as travel insurance and contingency planning.
Business leaders would also need to have a good understanding of the company culture and team camaraderie when planning for these trips as employees and their family members will be spending a lot of time together.
While company trips do offer employees a strict time-off from work and give them time to rest and relax, cash rewards like performance bonuses require less logistic planning and are more straightforward, Ms Dass noted.
“Employees will also be able to decide how they want to spend their rewards and improve their personal lives,” she said.
This includes having the flexibility to either take a trip to a country that they have always wanted to visit or pay off loans to alleviate financial stress, Ms Dass added.
But despite the practicality of cash rewards, these perks “lack the emotional depth of gratitude”, said ManpowerGroup Singapore’s Ms Teo.
Cash rewards also fail to achieve broader corporate objectives such as rapport-building, and creating a meaningful and memorable employee experience.
“In contrast, incentive trips and tangible gifts leave a lasting impression, serving as cherished mementos that employees carry for a long time. Experiences and mementos have enduring emotional value compared to transient cash rewards.”
On whether extravagant rewards are financially feasible for a company in the long run, Ms Dass noted that it depends on the company’s rewards structure and the total sum of all their employee benefits.
But such rewards can raise an employee’s expectations on what rewards should look like in the future as well, she said.
Employees would expect more extravagant rewards of higher value if they were to outperform their performance in the next year, which can become taxing for the company in the long run.
Ms Teo also noted that incentive trips are often awarded when a company has a strong financial foundation and employees have exceeded their performance target for the year.
“However, incentive trips need not be trips to expensive destinations. Trips to regional countries can have similar effects,” she said.