Show Notes
What’s shaping the future of incentive travel? Join Bishop-McCann’s Justin Myers as he speaks with Padraic Gilligan, former Chief Marketing Officer at SITE, to explore how the incentive travel landscape is evolving. With their shared passion for incentive travel, this episode dives into what's driving decisions in 2025 and beyond. Topics include:
- The mindset needed to navigate the current state of the industry
- Importance of hard and soft benefits for incentive travel's value proposition
- The role of purpose in incentive design
- Destination considerations for incentive travel
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Transcript
Host: 0:00
Hi, and welcome to The Events Experience, where we take a deep dive into everything event planning. I work for Bishop-McCann, an agency devoted to creating JOY through meetings, incentives, and events for big name brands. On this podcast, myself and our company's experts will discuss all things events, so keep listening to hear all about the latest tips and trends for virtual, live, and hybrid events.
Host: 0:27
Hi everyone! For this episode of The Events Experience, we are excited to welcome Padraic Gilligan, a leading voice in the incentive travel space. As the former Chief Marketing Officer at SITE and longtime advocate for the power of incentive programs, he offers valuable insights on navigating today's evolving landscape. Joining us to interview Padraic is Bishop-McCann’s Vice President of Client Development and Marketing, Justin Myers. With their shared passion for incentive travel, this is sure to be an insightful conversation. Thank you both for joining the podcast!
Justin Myers: 1:00
Thank you, Brenna, and thank you, Padraic, for joining us! I'm really looking forward to our conversation, diving into the incentive travel industry and what you're seeing as far as trends and how we navigate the ever-changing landscape that we're in. So to kind of kick things off, you've had an incredibly diverse career, from teaching to owning your own DMC to becoming one of the most respected leaders in the incentive travel industry. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your professional journey, and if there was a particular instance that inspired your transition into the field of incentive travel?
Padraic Gilligan: 1:40
Thanks, Justin, and thanks, Brenna. And congratulations to both of you for correctly pronouncing the name. It's a bit of an occupational hazard having a name like Padraic in an English-speaking global industry because it's not pronounced the way it's written. It's P-a-d-r-a-i-c. But you say Paw-ric, and it means Patrick. So I'm always kind of very grateful to people who have made the effort to figure out how to say it and managed to do it. So yeah, I've always been Padraic, although on my birth certificate it actually does say Patrick. But at a certain stage, my parents changed what they called me at home, and they used the Gaelic or the Irish form of my name.
Padraic Gilligan: 2:19
I started life as a teacher, which I loved. I taught in a Jesuit high school. I was an English teacher, teaching in a Jesuit high school that had the interesting kind of fun fact of having been the alma mater of James Joyce. So one of the most prominent novelists of the 20th century went to the high school that I ended up being a teacher in for about 13 years. I was also at the same time pursuing a career as an Italianist. I was trying to get into the university as an Italian lecturer, and there just weren't very many openings for Italian lecturers in Ireland in the 1980s. So I started using my Italian as a tour guide, as a translator and a tour guide, and I received a request from the Italian department in UCD, where I was working at the time. I received a request to provide a translator for an Italian journalist who was visiting Ireland for about ten days, with the objective of writing a series of articles about Ireland as a tourism destination.
Padraic Gilligan: 3:21
Now the journalist turned out to be none other than Alberto Moravia. So I mentioned James Joyce already. But Alberto Moravia, to anybody who has a kind of an Italian background or a knowledge of European literature, Alberto Moravia is the James Joyce of Italy. And he in his 80s was being sent by the Corriere della Sera, which is one of the big newspapers in Italy, to do this series of in-depth articles about Ireland to try to figure out the Irish psyche and why it might be appealing to Italians. So I got to combine, I suppose, my academic background with this newfound kind of career as a tour guide. And I worked then quite a lot as a tour guide and discovered at some stage as a tour guide that there were two different types of tours.
Padraic Gilligan: 4:08
You could have a leisure tour, or you could have one of these incredible things called an incentive. And if you had an incentive, you had to be very, very kind of careful and on your P's and Q's with the attendees because they were all super duper winners. They had to be all qualified to be on the trip, and they weren't tourists per se. They were qualifiers that their company had actually taken on this spectacular trip, and they had to be treated like VIPs. So I learned it, I suppose, by doing. And then around 1993, I had the great privilege of being able to go into business with my best friend Patrick Delaney, who many people listening to this podcast may know. He had been working with the Irish Tourist Board in the United States for a number of years and had been involved with the Society for Incentive Travel Excellence (he was the 1991 President). So he had moved back to Ireland, and together in ‘91, we started a DMC and gradually grew our DMC into kind of a pretty comprehensive business events offering. So we were offering meeting services, incentive travel experiences, conferences and congresses, and then events and exhibitions. So we were offering the whole kind of gamut of what might be regarded as a MICE offering in Ireland.
Padraic Gilligan: 5:21
We grew our agency to about 60 people, which is very big in a very small country. Eventually, we were acquired, and we were given the opportunity then of taking a brand that we had created in Ireland and rolling it out as a global DMC. So we claim to be in the kind of first rank of DMCs that move beyond handling business just in their own kind of location and offering services to agencies and to corporations at many different locations around the world.
Padraic Gilligan: 5:53
We got to about 100 offices, and that was a wonderful thing. And then Patrick and myself figured after about seven years that corporate citizenship wasn't probably the best thing for us, given the type of personalities that we had. So we went back into start-up mode, and we started a small consultancy called SoolNua, which we still have. And SoolNua is the marketing arm for SITE. We're under contract by SITE to provide all of their marketing and communications. So that keeps us very much at the heart of the business events industry and very specifically at the heart of the incentive travel industry. So I hope I didn't go on for too long, Justin. But that's basically how I got to where I am now.
Justin Myers: 6:33
It's perfect, and it's quite the journey. And actually, I love to always ask people in the industry that question because, honestly, I think a lot of us have fallen into it through whatever circumstance in life. So I appreciate you sharing that with us. And as you look at your professional career and journey, is there a particular moment that you point to and look back on and say, "This really what shaped who I am today?"
Padraic Gilligan: 7:00
It's a great question, and I can't think of one single moment. I think there are many, many moments, and the moments are more shaped by the people that I met along the way, as opposed to one single kind of historical encounter that kind of changed everything. So if I were to fully answer this question, I'd have to name a lot of people. And once you start naming people, there's always the danger that you're going to leave someone out. Probably the most important one out. So I won't name anybody. But I will say that it was the people along the way that shaped me, as opposed to the moments along the way, if that makes sense.
Justin Myers: 7:41
Absolutely makes sense. And I think the people, for me personally, is what keeps me engaged in this industry. I think it's so unique in that regard. Just the incredible talent and the incredible people globally in this industry that we get the opportunity to work with on a daily basis. I think it's such an incredible opportunity. I also love your journey. You started as a teacher, and you never left that, by the way. You are still a teacher today. I've had the privilege of sitting in many breakout sessions at SITE events, and I love your passion for teaching and learning. I think you're always a student and that's how I perceive you. But as you think about your life, I have to say juggling everything that you do professionally, and you're a musician. We had a conversation about your guitar in the background before we started here. You're a grandfather to, I think, 13 grandchildren - is that number correct?
Padraic Gilligan: 8:39
And counting!
Justin Myers: 8:41
And counting and growing, I love it. I mean, it's incredibly impressive. I have three kids of my own, and we're trying to balance all of the things, and we talk about balance a lot in our industry. I would love to know your perspective on how you have the energy just to keep all of those things in motion. And is there anything in particular that you do personally to help you find balance?
Padraic Gilligan: 9:05
Yes, yes there is. I think it's my morning walk. I figured kind of a long time ago that if I didn't have that kind of opportunity to just be reflective first thing in the day, that the day could kind of just get in on me. And I wouldn't have the proper kind of approach to it at all. So for a long time, I've actually gotten up early in the morning and gone walking. I'm very lucky insofar as where I live is beside a beautiful park. The other interesting thing about it is the park that I walk in is a park where my dad was a gardener. He was a landscaper, and he worked for the corporation that owned this park, which I walk in every day. So I kind of feel like I channel my dad as well as I walk.
Padraic Gilligan: 9:57
It's a beautiful forest there with 300-year-old trees and so on. I listen to something inspirational. I've got a strong faith that's very important to me, and I connect with that during that early morning walk. It sets me up for the day, and it makes me, I think, be hopefully a better person. I find if I don't get that time, I don't really get into the zone. I run as well, so I know the kind of idea of being in the zone is something that runners will actually appreciate. But I think I get into the zone of the day by just having that kind of 30 minutes in the morning. It's just a beautiful moment to be reflective and thankful and grateful for everything that I have in my life. And so that's what I do.
Justin Myers: 10:48
I love that, and I think it's great advice for us all to find a moment to be grounded and to pause. It's a mode of meditation, really. That's what it sounds like for you. So one more question kind of personally, and then we'll dive into some trends in the industry. But your passion, particularly for incentive travel, is I would say infectious. I mean, it's evident in everything that you write about, speak about. After all of these years being involved and being a leader in the industry, what is it that inspires you to continue to invest your time and your energy in the betterment and the growth of the incentive travel industry?
Padraic Gilligan: 11:29
Like you asked earlier on about kind of, you know, inflection moments in your life and so on, and there was an inflection moment in a way, when I consider it, where I went through a period of time where I was bothered by the fact that maybe I wasn't doing something useful. You know, maybe having been a teacher was a more noble thing to do. And the simple reason that kind of evolved into what I ended up doing was that I was a father of six children, and there wasn't enough money. Plain and simple. My wife needed to be at home to take care of the kids, and I needed to kind of basically generate two salaries. And that wasn't going to happen on a teacher salary. So the side hustles kind of became important, and then the side hustles became the main focus.
Padraic Gilligan: 12:11
But in making that transition, where you find yourself in a world that in many respects is a very shiny world, and some might say a very superficial world. If you're a reflective person, you may start asking, “Well, should I not be doing something a little bit more kind of constructive with my life?” And I had a really interesting experience at a certain stage. I was running with my client and great friend, Paul Ader. We were running an event in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, and as we were walking to the venue for the gala dinner, one of the qualifiers actually caught up with us dressed in his tuxedo and started a really interesting conversation with Paul, thanking Paul because this was his last event.
Padraic Gilligan: 12:55
He was retiring. So this is a guy in his kind of mid 60s. And what I learned from the conversation was that he had been on practically every incentive that Paul had been part of organizing for about 25 years. But his story was very interesting because he had left high school without a diploma, and he had ended up working in the insurance company that was now honoring him with this incentive travel experience. He had ended up working in that company in the post room and, you know, just got opportunities over time to move out of the post room. And he got involved with sales support and so on. You know, by his mid 20s was beginning to discover that he actually was a very, very good salesperson and became then a serial qualifier for the incentives that were organized by the insurance company that he worked for. So this is what he was kind of reflecting on, and he said this extraordinary thing at a certain stage.
Padraic Gilligan: 13:52
He said, “Look, here we are. We're going to the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. I've been here before because the particular program had been at that very location 20 years previously.” And he kind of almost knew more about the venue than we did because he had researched it. But he was talking about the fact that he still met with buddies that he'd had from junior high. They'd meet for a beer, and he was kind of making the point that none of them had ever left their zip code. They'd all literally stayed where they grew up, and they were all very happy guys. And he really liked them and had a great relationship with them. But when it came to talking about kind of, you know, world affairs, he just says he found that their kind of knowledge was just so based on stereotypes and so based on stuff that simply wasn't true because they'd never actually been taken out of their comfort zone. And he was talking just about the extent to which travel experiences had transformed his life. Then I got that kind of moment in my mind where I said, “That's it.” You know, we mightn't be curing cancer, but we are actually in some way contributing to the building of a better world. We are in some way contributing to the establishing of tolerance, understanding, respect for diversity, and so on.
Padraic Gilligan: 15:15
Since then, I've really kind of got very focused on travel as transformation. You know, there's a great phrase that Mark Twain uses about travel being the enemy of bigotry, and that's clearly true. When you know somebody who's from a different culture to yours or looks different from you, and you know them and realize that they have exactly the same kind of human desires as you have, then it changes everything. They're not an enemy. They're not somebody to be afraid of. They're somebody to celebrate with because that's what we do. We share a kind of common humanity. So that's, I suppose, that's been kind of my thing in a way. And it's what I've tried to bring to SITE as SITE also kind of tries to define what incentive travel is beyond being a kind of a performance enhancement tool used in an organization to create kind of extraordinary levels of performance. What else is going on there? And what we've been looking at is we've been looking at the fact that it's transformative in relation to the individual that qualifies. It's transformative in relation to the corporation or company that that person works for, and it's transformative in relation to the destination that they actually visit as well. So if intentionally kind of planned in that way, incentive travel can be a very, very powerful tool.
Justin Myers: 16:40
Padraic, I couldn't agree more with what you said, and I love the story that you shared to go along with it. I think the key is the "if intentionally planned that way" that you said, I think that is the true measure of what's the intention behind the incentive travel program. And that should speak directly to planners and to clients end-users. You know, how are we approaching this to design this if the goal truly is to create something that's transformational? I love that you tied your inspiration back to an attendee story. I see this myself. You know, we talk about JOY at Bishop-McCann, and I never see that come through as much as when I'm on site at an incentive program. You see an attendee and just their reaction to experiencing something that they've never experienced before, receiving recognition, but in particular, if they're immersed in a new culture, you know. The example that you shared with the attendee, he talked about how this travel over the years, it had truly changed his life, and it changes your worldview if it's designed correctly, as you said. You talked about the Mark Twain quote. You know, Anthony Bourdain says something along the lines of travel isn't always pretty or comfortable, but the journey changes you and it should change you.
Justin Myers: 18:01
And I think in incentive travel, we do try to make it pretty and comfortable. But I think the point there is to get out of the resort, walk the streets of a local town, chat with a local cafe owner, share a drink at a pub with a local. I think the real magic is in experiencing authentic people in a culture that you've never seen before. It's about human connection, and that's the bigger purpose behind incentive travel.
Justin Myers: 18:28
So I'd love to dive into the state of the industry today. And I think if there's a word right now that we all feel, it's "uncertainty," and our industry has certainly been through some pretty turbulent times over the decades and certainly in recent years as well. So how would you describe, you know, going through many of these turbulent times yourself, the mindset that is required for incentive travel professionals and leaders in our space to navigate this current chapter that we're experiencing today - where we're seeing both uncertainty and growth at the same time.
Padraic Gilligan: 19:09
Yeah, they are extraordinary times; there's no doubt. And the good thing is that we haven't quite been here before because I think what we're actually experiencing at this moment in time is - to use a word that's often used and, you know, maybe not merited, but they are - "unprecedented" times. I don't think we've ever seen a kind of kaleidoscopic reordering of the world order to the extent that we're seeing at the moment. So let's see how it plays out. But I think we have in our playbook coping mechanisms that we've learned as a result of coming to terms with the very heart of travel being attacked by terrorism, for example, literally kind of leaving us wondering whether you can put people on a plane anymore. You know, we've come through that. We've come through incredible recessions and repositioning of markets, and we've come through a pandemic. And if we were to talk longer, we'd probably come up with lots of other things that we've come through as well. We've come through more recently, you know, climate episodes that obviously have had a huge impact on travel as well. What we're facing at the moment is unprecedented, there's no doubt about it. But I think the coping principles remain the same. And I think they're really well laid out in that great book by Jim Collins, which I think it was 2001 that the book came out called Good to Great. His famous kind of phrase about companies that survive through the vicissitudes and the ups and downs of different kinds of economic sort of moments.
Padraic Gilligan: 20:52
They do so because they followed the Stockdale Paradox. And the Stockdale Paradox is the story of a US prisoner of war who basically was in a hopeless situation. It was very unlikely, or he couldn't see any way, that he could possibly escape or get out of the captivity that he was in. But his mantra was that he needed to take that into account. In other words, he needed to face the brutal facts of what he was actually living through, but never lose hope. And I think the kind of the balancing of those two things, of not adopting a Pollyanna sort of approach of "everything is fine" even when it's not, but facing the brutal facts. Looking at situations, analyzing the situation, parsing it, and calling it what it is, but equally holding on to the hope that we need to hold on to. And that hope is what gets us to where we need to be. Everything passes. We know that. We know that from COVID; we thought it would never end. And now we look back, and we say, "My goodness, that was already kind of three, four years ago." And it held up all kinds of activity for almost two years. So in many respects, we have in our armory and in our playbook a recent kind of experience of dealing with something existential. And we've come out the right side of that, and we'll come out the right side of the current uncertainty. So long as we face the brutal facts. But don't give up hope.
Justin Myers: 22:34
Yeah, completely agree with you. And I think having the recent lessons that we've learned through COVID, hopefully, allows us to take that perspective. But it is easier said than done to balance those things, to assess the realities that we're in, while continuing to remain optimistic about the future. Do you see that in practice? Are you seeing the industry embrace the Stockdale Paradox as you say it? Like that mindset? Could we be doing a better job of that given the current landscape?
Padraic Gilligan: 23:11
Yeah, one of the difficulties that we have is that our industry moves a little bit like a piston, like we go forward and back almost at the same time. So in many respects, what we're doing now is in relation to business that we hope to generate for ‘26 and ‘27, but at the same time, we're delivering now on what we actually sold in ‘23 and ‘24. So it's a curious thing. So we've got concentrate on delivering what needs to be delivered, while at the same time looking into a future that may be different from the way that things are at this particular moment in time.
Padraic Gilligan: 23:53
I run the advisory board for the city of Brussels in Belgium, and we had eight really, really bright people around the table last week: a corporate end user, some agencies, some PCOs on the association side, and some associations. And in many respects, everybody is waiting and seeing. You know, nobody knows the answer because the question hasn't even been properly formulated. It's like waiting for an image to appear on your screen, and you start seeing the beginning of it, but it takes a little while before the whole thing actually kind of pixelates properly in front of you. That's what we're in at the moment. So this is an extraordinary situation, not to be able to plan at all.
Padraic Gilligan: 24:40
I think scenario planning could be good. You know, using three, four, five different scenarios from a senior leadership team. I think that's a good way of at least sort of voicing the different outcomes that there could be. And I'm assuming that people are beginning to do that. But certainly last week with a group of eight very, very bright industry players and very kind of high-level industry players, it definitely wasn't rabbits in the headlights. But we actually don't know what to do next because we haven't seen yet what the implications are going to be. From the SITE Global Conference, there were some very, very definite actions being taken in relation to some previous policies that had been enacted. And certainly, one of the Canadian agencies had been instructed by her client to take eight pieces of business that had been confirmed for the United States back to Canada. You know, so whether that's a kind of example of what we might expect to see, who knows? This is still very much in flux. I was going to say we'll get a better idea as things unfold, but that may not be the case. But we'll certainly be obliged to act because you can't kind of not act, despite uncertainty.
Justin Myers: 26:00
Well, I mean, you speak to the nature of our work, and we are almost required to be futurist, qualified or not to do so. But we are because we are operating in the present moment, but we're also selling into 2 or 3 years beyond. So we have to think about the uncertainty of today and what are the repercussions of that. And I think the tendency is typically to pull back and be more cautious, which is what I see when that uncertainty exists.
Justin Myers: 26:29
So talking about looking at the future and selling incentive travel in the future, me personally, I really believe in the transformative power of incentive travel - not just as a reward or recognition for great performance - but really as a tool for building culture and connection with companies. And so for me, it's been exciting to see the research with the Incentive Travel Index really start to speak to these soft benefits. Certainly coming out of COVID, the landscape of remote work shifted, and companies were trying to solve so many different, new challenges. I think the value proposition of incentive travel grew tremendously. So do you see that continuing in today's landscape, that kind of soft versus hard balance as far as the benefits of incentive travel, and how do you see us positioning the value proposition of incentive travel in the future?
Padraic Gilligan: 27:30
I think it's always going to oscillate between the hard dollars and the soft power. There's no doubt about that. I think in any kind of sales pitch around incentive travel, the person that you're pitching to will either immediately see the hard dollar benefits and want to go with that or the soft power. So in a way, I think one becomes the extra bonus for the other. And because the two are involved, I think it validates the action, and it validates the investment. It makes the business case for incentive travel. That this is something that can actually generate a bottom line but also can do a whole lot of intangible things around company culture, relationships, and all the other things that you have an HR department to kind of look after. But in a way, they're the kind of things that are unleashed best through serendipity. It's the unplanned kind of aspects of connections that happen in the workplace that make the difference to people who forge those kinds of links. Incentive travel in a way sets up, in its nature, lots of serendipitous kinds of connections to happen between a CEO and a sales team. But I think the hard dollars are important as well. You know, we seem to be moving and again, you know, who knows. But like, we went through an interesting kind of repurposing and refocusing on the very nature of what a corporation was. The business round table about 2018 redefined a corporation beyond the simple - a corporation exists to generate shareholder return. It kind of redefined us way outside of hard dollars into a kind of social contract. So a business had a responsibility to the people who work there, to the location where it's based, to the environment around it.
Padraic Gilligan: 29:38
So all of the things that then (or many of them at least) got kind of crystallized under maybe that DEI category or the ESG category, where companies were actually reporting on ESG activities and their annual reports had to actually have very, very clear evidence of how they were supporting environment, social, and governance - there now appears to be a rejection of that. Now, let's just say it as it is. And right down it's to the point that law firms, who have DEI principles at their center, are now being told to dismantle those, or run the risk of losing government contracts. So we could be getting back into a purely transactional way of doing business, in which case the hard dollar return of incentive travel is a more than good enough kind of reason for incentive travel to exist. So if we become exclusively transactional in terms of how we define ourselves as a business, incentive travel still comes to the top in terms of its ability to generate a return on investment. In a kind of a wider, more holistic view of what a corporation exists for, obviously the soft power benefits then become hugely important as well - soft power benefits and obligations, including things like climate, including things like sustainability, and so on. It's worth a lot of brainstorming, but I think we may have to reposition incentive travel in that kind of transactional category again, in order to justify its existence within a particular kind of understanding of what it means to do business. But we can do that.
Justin Myers: 31:28
Yeah. No, it's a great point that the hard dollar returns are enough to justify the existence because that's there. That's the core of what incentive travel is designed to do, right? It drives performance. It drives growth. But as a part of a total rewards strategy for corporations, and it is a shifting dynamic today, what that looks like, there are so many other values that incentive travel brings to different roles within that C-suite. Right? You mentioned the HR role. But a great reminder that the hard dollar returns, if that is reverting back and we need to point to that again as the primary drive, it's there. The proof is there.
Justin Myers: 32:15
So you've traveled the world many times over. What is a hidden gem for you? Or maybe is there an under-the-radar destination that you think deserves a little more love from the incentive travel industry?
Padraic Gilligan: 32:29
Well, it's no secret because I've kind of said it often enough that I consider Slovenia to be Europe's kind of hidden secret. It's an extraordinary destination insofar as a population of under 2 million. Relatively kind of small landmass, but within that landmass are like 3 or 4 different contrasting experiences. One of Europe's great capital cities, Ljubljana, is a walking city. Very, very kind of interesting sort of mayor and city council that have a huge commitment to creating a sustainable city. It was, in fact, the green capital of Europe a couple of years ago. But it's genuinely a city that you can walk around. It's very, very safe. It's very beautiful. It's chocolate-box gorgeous in terms of just, you know, you can go everywhere on a bike. And then Slovenia has its Alps, which are kind of comparable to anything in Switzerland. Now, Switzerland is an amazing country. Slovenia is just a little less expensive with absolutely stunning scenery. It's got a short coastline, but again, a beautiful coastline where you've got Piran, Portoroz, and some really, really nice resorts there as well. There's a beautiful Kempinski hotel. The international hotels are coming in. There's a magnificent Intercontinental right in Ljubljana, which is probably within the Intercontinental portfolio as one of the signature experiences - really, really beautiful property. And there are others coming into the city as well. So yeah, that's my kind of hidden gem. I have said that before. The difficulty is that what about all the hidden gems that I haven't been to, or that I haven't discovered yet? There are so many of them, but I do like destinations that are ultimately themselves. In other words, there's an authenticity there, and that's one of the things that kind of literally jumps out at you from Slovenia and Ljubljana as a city in particular.
Justin Myers: 34:37
Authenticity is certainly something that I look for in my personal travels. My wife and I are planning to visit Croatia and Slovenia this fall, so I'm very excited to see it. So if you were designing an incentive travel experience for yourself, what would that look like?
Padraic Gilligan: 34:54
I suppose I would definitely go back to my background in Italian. So it would be somewhere in Italy. It would definitely involve being immersed in probably the mountains rather than the sea. It might be Tuscany, or it might be Umbria, or it might be Puglia. Like it could be anywhere. There's an extraordinary kind of culture in Italy around fresh food and eating food in season. So depending on what the season is, you'd go north or south, or I would go north or south. You could have an amazing experience in Piedmont, for example, in the northwest of Italy for the truffle season. An incentive travel experience for me would probably involve a more boutique-style incentive. So it would be a smaller group of people, and it would be in a really, really nice, family-owned kind of hotel, where there was lots of tradition going back over the generations. But I guess the thing that I would be connecting with or looking to connect with would be just great gastronomy and great kinds of traditions in gastronomy in a stunningly beautiful location.
Justin Myers: 36:12
Yeah, if you're focused on gastronomy, you really can't beat Italy as your destination of choice, no matter where you are. So thank you again for joining us today! And we love to always conclude our podcast, bringing it back to Bishop-McCann's mission statement of "We Create JOY." And I always love when we're talking about incentive travel, because I don't think there's a better example in the MICE industry that really aligns with that mission of creating JOY. Is there any recent travel or incentive travel experiences that you've been a part of that have brought joy, where you've seen a story that might inspire our listeners?
Padraic Gilligan: 36:52
There is actually, a group of us, a small group of 12 people, met for lunch at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, and the lunch was hosted by two of our party, who had called a lunch together in honor of a gentleman called Bob Mooney, who had been the sales director of one of the Irish-owned hotel chains for a number of years. And we spent probably 5 or 6 hours together reminiscing on just the privileged kind of relationship that we've had with each other. A lot of the people around the table would have been competitors of each other at one stage, and lots of the stories were stories of IT&ME in Chicago, IMEX in Las Vegas. And it was just an extraordinary example of the richness of the careers that we have as incentive travel professionals. The places that we get to go to, the experiences that we get to have. And in relation to this particular group, the way we actually shape each other, the way we make each other into the people that we become, and the people around the table had all known each other probably for kind of 30 years, 40 years, maybe. So that was a real moment of joy, and it was the joy of being in the presence of others who share your joy around being an incentive travel experience person.
Justin Myers: 38:25
I love it. You know, even competitors or former competitors around the table. I mean, some of my best friends in the industry would be quote-unquote competitors. But I love the spirit of camaraderie that exists in collaboration for the betterment of the industry. So, Padraic, thank you again so much for taking some time to join us on our podcast today! I greatly appreciate you sharing your knowledge and your wisdom with me and with our listeners. So thank you again for your time. I appreciate it.
Padraic Gilligan: 38:56
Thanks, Justin. Really appreciate the opportunity to chat, and thanks for those wonderful, really thought-provoking questions. Thank you so much!
Host: 39:03
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