Skift Take
The original vision at Icehotel 26 years ago combined a love for sustainability, creativity and local culture in a hotel environment, which has come to define today's corporate incentive programs.
The dogsled ride from Kiruna Airport in northern Sweden to Icehotel is one of the great airport transfers in the world, ranking up there with the lagoon boats in Bora Bora and helicopter flights from Nice to Monaco.
It's a 90-minute flight due north from Stockholm to Kiruna located high above the Arctic Circle. When you first walk outside the terminal, you can hear the dogs barking because they don't like to sit around. Everyone is then provided high-tech snowmobile suits for the 4-person sleds pulled by 16 pure-bred Siberian huskies.
Unique group experiences like the dogsled ride have elevated Icehotel into one of the meeting industry's most innovative locations for corporate incentive programs.
Top selling sales executives and high-value business partners—the type of people who are recognized with incentive travel reward trips—have always demanded aspirational travel experiences that they wouldn't generally purchase on their own.
Today, however, Millennial incentive travel winners also tend to want more educational, innovative, adventurous and socially responsible programming, which defines the Icehotel experience.
"Last year we did about six million Swedish kroner (U.S. $700,000) in corporate group business total," says Dan Hollström, director of sales at Icehotel. "This year we already have bookings for m
