Incentivate con el Equipo País: Training and Gamification Program for INPROTUR

Argentina had a strong position and investment in the international MICE segment, but until 2020 professional consulting and training efforts were focused almost exclusively on the association conventions and congresses niche, with no specific offering for the incentive travel and motivational events segment. Argentina’s mandatory 2020 lockdown left most tourism and meetings professionals in the country without work, with plenty of free time but no specific source of updated knowledge on this niche.

INPROTUR brought in Alejandro Verzoub, former president of SITE Global (2012) and founder and president of the SITE South America Chapter (2011-2016), to design and deliver the first nationwide training program on incentive travel and motivational events in Argentina. The program, free for the entire public and private sector, split the audience into 5 professional segments (receptive agencies/DMCs, event organizers and incentive agencies, hotels and convention centers, Convention Bureaus and provincial tourism promotion offices, and new industry players), with 8 90-minute seminars per segment via Zoom, 40 seminars in total, between September and December 2020. To keep engagement alive over the program’s 6-month run, a dedicated platform was built, incentivateconelequipopais.com.ar, which turned the training into a real incentive experience: every interaction earned points, from registration and attendance to themed quizzes for each seminar, general-knowledge and visual challenges, a social media usage survey, and the “Viralizate con el Equipo País” contest for LinkedIn posts with a dedicated hashtag. Rankings were published progressively by segment to spur competition among peers, and the program closed with digital diplomas for anyone who passed 330 points and gold, silver and bronze medals for the top three finishers in each segment.

792 professionals registered, well above the 500 target set by INPROTUR. The final satisfaction survey rated the overall program experience at an average of 4.63 out of 5, with specific mentions of the trainer’s quality, the clarity of the content, and the originality of the platform. The initiative won the FIP Silver 2022 award, category MP.9 – Promotional Actions for Travel and Tourism Organizations.

This program turned a conventional training course into an incentive program applied to education: the same points, rankings and rewards logic that AV Business designs for its corporate clients was used here to keep almost 800 professionals engaged for 6 months during the pandemic. It is also the case study that best represents AV Business’s own technological capability to manage gamified digital activations, in the same family as the sports prediction game (PRODE) the company has built for World Cups and Copa América tournaments since 2018.