How pop culture touchpoints like the show “The White Lotus” can bring more than a pop of excitement to an incentive program.
Pop culture has long added a certain mystique to properties and destinations, making people long to experience for themselves what they saw in a favorite TV show, streamer or movie. Now savvy incentive planners are taking advantage of some of today’s hottest pop culture touchpoints — such as the show “The White Lotus” — to make their events even more incentivizing.
Prevue recently caught up with Kelsey Nicol, Vice President of Strategic Accounts with One10, which provides travel and events, incentives and recognition, and marketing services to support its clients in improving human performance.
Prevue: So what exactly is a pop culture incentive?
Nicol: The purpose of incentive travel is to create an experience someone couldn’t have on their own, and when you tie in a pop-cultural reference to a destination that they’ve seen on TV or in a movie and social media, it’s highly motivational. People are seeing destinations on TV and social media that they are forming an emotional connection to and putting on their bucket lists — let’s give them an incentive experience in that destination.
Companies can use that built-in excitement and anticipation to increase their ROI, motivation and sales by tying in a place that already a lot of people are inspired to visit.
Prevue: This isn’t a new thing, is it? How does White Lotus factor in?
Nicol: No, it’s not new. I remember watching “Sex and the City” growing up, where New York was as much a character as the four women. But the trend really took off coming out of the pandemic, when people started doing “revenge travel” after not being able to go anywhere for so long.
A good example is the show “The White Lotus,” which was one of the first travel shows coming out of the pandemic. They filmed the first season at the Four Seasons Resort Maui, which was closed during the pandemic — otherwise, that hotel never would have been able to shut down for the production since demand is just so high at that property. HBO did a beautiful job of immersing an everyday family’s life into the destination that they inspired people to want to experience that destination for themselves. From a group perspective, Maui is a very attainable place to go.
Where the “White Lotus” influence really kicked off was in Sicily, where the second season was filmed at the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Taormina. A lot of people know about Sicily and may have been to Italy several times, but not to Sicily. HBO also did a great job of promoting the third season’s Thailand locales at the Four Seasons Koh Samui, the Anantara Mai Khao Phuket and Villa Jacinta, also in Kho Samui. Even those who have never watched the show will be inspired by the properties and the destinations. And they can be complicated to get to, and require some expertise to get around, so these are places and properties that people likely won’t get to on their own.
Prevue: What are some other hot pop culture destinations nowadays?
Nicol: While The White Lotus kicked the trend off, the show “Emily in Paris” really put Paris back on the incentive map. I was in London recently and we ended up talking a lot about soccer and “Ted Lasso.” It can be any show where the characters are really immersed in the destination. We want to live that fantasy life — like the fashions in “Emily in Paris” — or immerse ourselves in the beauty of a destination we see over 10 episodes in a season.
Prevue: How far do you go to tie the incentive to that pop-culture reference in the incentive? Is it mainly the hotel and the destination, or do you include activity tie-ins as well?
Nicol: You can start with the destination and the hotel used in the show, such as the Hôtel Plaza Athénée for “Emily in Paris” — which is a very incentive-friendly hotel. It can be a piece of the program from an activity standpoint, but a small piece. We still want to focus on personalization so everyone walks away feeling the experience was very much tailored for them. For example, for a Rome program when the Stanley Tucci “Searching for Italy” program was all the rage, we did a Stanley Tucci food tour for those who wanted to walk in his footsteps. But it was just one of several optional activities.
Prevue: What about other type of pop culture touchstones outside of TV and movies? Like tying an incentive into the recent Taylor Swift Eras tour?
Nicol: I would say no, at least from a large-group perspective. Small, very high-end groups might do something like that, but incentives are planned far enough out that the concert dates may not be available yet.
But I would say yes, definitely, for other types of cultural events, such as the Montreux Jazz Festival, the Monaco Grand Prix, the Olympics in Milan in 2026 and in Los Angeles in 2028. I’m sure there will be incentives booked around those. A lot of clients like to book incentive trips around the Grammys. At least you’ll have the dates locked in.
Prevue: It sounds like incorporating pop culture into an incentive could make the marketing and motivational piece a little easier.
Nicol: In a way, it is free marketing for us, because these pop culture phenomena are on everyone’s mind. It even has helped me sell a client on a destination I had been suggested to pitch by my preferred hotel contact at the time — this was back around 2011. They wanted unique properties on the West Coast, and my hotel contact suggested the Ojai Valley Inn and Spa. I knew the movie “Easy A” with Emma Stone had been filmed in Ojai, and when I mentioned the film and that Reese Witherspoon got married there, the client said, “Yep, let’s do Ojai.”
When you think about it, TV and movie production scouts do a lot of what we do in our industry in site visits. They scout it out ahead of time, check out the local venues, just as we do. So really, they are doing some of that work for us by ensuring that the venue fits into their storyline and is something truly unique that’s going to draw people in, while also providing the security and exclusivity they need for the shoot. They want the venue and destination to draw viewership, just as we want to motivate people to do what they need to do to qualify for the incentive.
Again, when people see something on TV or in the movie theater, it inspires them to think that this is something they might want to do someday, something to dream about that they don’t necessarily think they could or would ever do. Then you plan an incentive there that gives them the opportunity to actually do it.
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