Venice-bound groups will applaud the
opening of the 380-room Hilton Molino Stucky Venice. The neo-Gothic
luxury hotel, being created out of the remnants of a 19th-century
flour mill, will debut in mid-2007 with a 6,400-square-foot spa and
more than 20,000 square feet of meeting space, including a
10,000-square-foot ballroom.
The Forum for people performance
management and measurement at Northwestern University in Evanston,
Ill., unveiled a study of an incentive program at a Midwestern
financial services company that showed sales increased by $180,000
during the incentive period, versus a cost of $164,000 for the
program. The real benefit of the incentive, the study found, was in
the sustained sales uptick after the program had concluded, rather
than during the program.
The Society of incentive and travel executives has unveiled an
online request-for-proposal service at www.site-intl.org/rfp. The search engine narrows down
the 2,000 incentive professionals in the database to a manageable
number before the RFP is sent out.