Short Escapes Experience Creation for the MICE and Leisure Markets
The authors of Short Escapes, who published among the first experiential travel guidebooks for Random House’s Fodor’s division in the 1990s, now provide an advisory service for destinations, organizations, and travelers seeking to add stimulating experiences to event attendees and visitors.
Short Escapes makes it easy for destinations and organizations to create greater meaning for event attendees and travelers by crafting authentic experiences that affect them positively and mesh with an organization’s goals, audience and budget or travelers' own personal values.
The Short Escapes team helps destinations create and market unique, authentic experiences for the group and leisure market and helps event planners create customized experiences and stories for specific meetings.
The experiential travel advisory service brings together the complementary expertise of Short Escapes founders
Bruce Bolger and
Gary Stoller. Stoller is a multi-award-winning journalist who helped launch Conde Nast Traveler magazine and was USA TODAY’s investigative travel editor. Bolger is a successful travel industry publisher, meetings and incentives executive and the founder of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance. He recently authored a comprehensive
guide on sustainability for the Society for Incentive Travel Innovation.
Depending on your destination, group, its objectives, or personal interests of travelers, you can take your group on an easy ascent up a mountain where they can gaze alone at the New York City skyline from a vantage point few tourists ever see. Your attendees or visitors can visit unspoiled lands where Native Americans roamed 4,000 years ago, or they can visit American beaches where a German U-boat dropped off four spies before being apprehended during World War II. We bring history and culture to life in a way that helps your destination tell its own story to group attendees and visitors in a way that enhances commerce to less known localities in a destination.
Short Escapes’ New Service Makes Every Business Meeting or Visit More Meaningful
The pandemic has transformed business events. People want to travel, but they also want more authentic experiences, as demonstrated by the popular travel shows of Anthony Bourdain and Stanley Tucci. Since the 1990s, Short Escapes has crafted such experiences for consumers and meeting planners in the Fodor’s guidebooks and at ShortEscapes.net.
This highly affordable experiential advisory service works with your destination marketing or meeting planning team to map out and implement experiences that can be packaged for ongoing use. A destination can create self-guide tours or engage directly with local guides or other service providers.
As part of the process, Short Escapes experts:
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Work with destinations to identify and package key experiences they can share with both the MICE and leisure markets, and DMCs. These target unique outdoors and/or culture experiences convenient to travel centers, and include a story, photos or videos, and a link to maps when appropriate. See samples at Shortescapes.net.
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Work with event planners to identify the goal of the meeting or incentive travel program, the composition of the audience and the values the organization is trying to convey. Identify a half-day, daylong, morning, lunch or evening experience, based on the destination, logistics, and budget, that is specifically designed to reinforce the goals of the meeting or incentive program in a meaningful way. Publish a short compelling story and photos of the experience that each attendee can keep as a memory of the event.
Experiences can include almost anything you might imagine. They can get people out of meeting rooms and allow them to participate together in intimate learning and sharing experiences designed to reinforce the values your organization is trying to instill. See
Shortescapes.net to imagine the types of stories you can tell and the experiences you can create. These aren’t just experiences. They are stories that support your goals.
