IRF’s new Academic Research in Action: Designing Incentives That Spark Flow identified conditions that make the state of flow triggered by an incentive trip more likely to occur. That includes:
- Clear goals
- The right balance between challenge and skill
- Immediate feedback
- Autonomy
- Novelty
- Social connection
- Physical engagement
Travel can provide novelty through unfamiliar surroundings and activities, autonomy when participants have choices, physical engagement through active experiences and social connection through shared experiences.
New data shows business travelers are seeking deeper experiences
World Tourism Day arrives Sept. 27 with fresh evidence that travelers are looking beyond simply checking destinations off a list. New data shows growing interest in experiences that take visitors beyond major tourism centers, while research from the Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) offers another way of looking at what happens when travel becomes truly absorbing.
The headline word is “immersion”: encountering something new, engaging deeply with an experience and, sometimes, becoming so absorbed that everything else seems to fall away.
What Is Flow?
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pioneered the concept of “flow,” describing it as complete immersion in an activity that requires concentration and skill but can produce a feeling of effortless action and control. It’s what athletes often mean when they talk about being “in the zone.”
IRF’s new Academic Research in Action: Designing Incentives That Spark Flow, authored by Chief Academic Advisor Allan Schweyer, examines how incentive programs can create conditions conducive to that state. Flow has been positively associated with job performance, creativity, engagement, job satisfaction and well-being, according to research cited by IRF.
No incentive can simply switch flow on. Instead, research has identified conditions that make it more likely to occur. Among the most important are clear goals, the right balance between challenge and skill, immediate feedback, autonomy, novelty and social connection. Physical engagement, or what IRF calls “deep embodiment,” can also promote entry into flow.
IRF points out that experiential rewards naturally contain several potential flow triggers. Travel can provide novelty through unfamiliar surroundings and activities, autonomy when participants have choices, physical engagement through active experiences and social connection through shared experiences. Group incentive travel, the report says, can activate nearly every flow trigger on its list.
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That doesn’t mean sending someone on a trip guarantees flow. It suggests that thoughtfully designed travel experiences can provide an environment where it has a better chance of happening.
Getting Out of the City
New World Tourism Day data from destination marketplace and tour operator The Tour Guy offers a real-world look at travelers’ appetite for experiences beyond the most familiar attractions.
A survey of 107,000 travelers who visited Europe during the previous 12 months found that 85.4% opt for day trips while visiting a destination. The company’s booking data tells a similar story: Day-trip bookings increased 110.7% year over year in 2026.
Why leave the city? Curiosity leads the way. Nearly 65% of respondents said they take day trips because they want to see countryside, seaside and natural landscapes beyond city borders. Another 53.4% have a particular attraction outside the city they want to experience. Only 8.5% said their motivation was simply taking a break from city sightseeing.
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Those findings are especially interesting alongside IRF’s research because novelty is one of the recognized triggers associated with flow. IRF recommends experiential and travel rewards featuring new destinations or activities as one way incentive planners can introduce novelty. It also points to physical movement and time in nature as factors that can help set the stage for the focused engagement characteristic of flow.
Familiar Place, New Experience
Novelty doesn’t necessarily require discovering an unknown destination.
The Tour Guy reports that one in four day trips sold on its platform this year is a new experience that wasn’t offered in 2025. But none of those experiences takes travelers to a new destination. Instead, operators are creating new ways to engage with familiar places.
One example is a Pompeii experience that combines the archaeological site with the geology of Mount Vesuvius and is led by both an archaeologist and volcanologist. In Chianti, meanwhile, an experience previously incorporated into a broader Tuscany itinerary has been redesigned specifically around wineries.
Some of the fastest-growing day trips are similarly attached to recognizable names. Trips to Sintra from Lisbon and Tuscany villages from Rome have recorded quadruple-digit booking growth, with a Mont-Saint-Michel trip from Paris ranking third among the fastest-growing options.
That suggests novelty doesn’t have to mean taking attendees somewhere they’ve never heard of. It can mean giving them a way to experience a familiar destination that requires greater participation, introduces a new perspective or gets them more deeply involved in the place around them.
IRF’s research adds another layer to that idea. Novelty, autonomy, social connection and physical engagement aren’t merely ingredients for a memorable itinerary; they’re also among the conditions researchers have associated with flow. Group travel, in particular, can combine novel environments, shared experiences and embodied activity.
World Tourism Day may celebrate where people go. For meeting and incentive professionals, the more interesting question may be how deeply they experience it once they get there.
The Tour Guy survey was conducted Sept. 7–14, 2026, among 107,000 travelers who had visited Europe during the previous 12 months. Booking data covers Jan. 1–Sept. 15, 2026, compared with the same period in 2025. The company defines a day trip as a guided tour departing from a major European city for a destination
