The Incentive Travel Index: 2025 Benchmarks Every Planner Should Know

If you plan incentive travel and you read one industry benchmark a year, make it the Incentive Travel Index. Produced by SITE and the Incentive Research Foundation, the 2025 edition drew on 2,708 respondents across buyers, suppliers, and destinations — making it the closest thing this fragmented industry has to a single source of truth. Here's the digest: the numbers that matter, what changed, and what to do with them.

The headline number: $5,100 per person

The ITI 2025 pegs the global average per-person spend at roughly $5,100 — up about 4% year over year. That increase is notable in a cost-conscious climate: budgets rose even as planners actively hunted for savings. The read is that incentive travel is holding its ground as a retention and performance tool precisely because the labor market makes top performers hard to keep. When the war for talent is hot, the trip is cheaper than the turnover.

Cost pressure is real — and here's where planners are cutting

Spend rose, but not without a fight. The ITI documents exactly which levers planners pulled to contain costs, and the ranking is instructive because it shows what buyers are willing to sacrifice first.

The telling detail: the most popular cut is gifting, not the experience itself. Planners protect the trip — the emotional core — and trim the swag. That aligns with everything the research says about why non-cash rewards work: it's the memory and the recognition that drive value, not the branded backpack. Read our full breakdown of incentive travel on a budget for how to apply these levers without gutting the program.

Destination substitution, not elimination

Notice that "cheaper destinations" ranks near the top while "cancel the program" appears nowhere. The market response to cost pressure is substitution — swapping a marquee international destination for a strong regional one — rather than retreat. That's a healthy signal for the category and a practical playbook for planners: the goal is to preserve the aspirational feel at a lower landed cost, which our destination guides are built to help with.

The AI story is the biggest change in the index

The single most dramatic shift in ITI 2025 is adoption of AI. A striking 93% of respondents report using ChatGPT in some capacity, and roughly 74% use Microsoft Copilot. This is no longer experimental — it's ambient. Where planners actually apply it breaks down like this:

The pattern is that AI penetrates fastest where the task is text-heavy and low-risk — writing the announcement email — and slower where judgment and stakes rise, like program design. That 35% program-design figure is the one to watch: it's the frontier. For the full picture, see our guide to AI in incentive travel planning.

Sentiment: optimism holds, but tempered

Beyond the hard numbers, the ITI tracks how the ecosystem feels about the year ahead — and 2025's read is cautiously optimistic. Buyers and suppliers alike expect program activity to grow, driven by the same talent-retention logic pushing budgets up. But that optimism is tempered by cost anxiety and economic uncertainty, which is precisely why the cost-trim tactics above are so widely deployed. The mood isn't retreat — it's disciplined expansion. Planners want to keep doing more, and they're getting sharper about how they pay for it.

That combination — rising activity plus rising discipline — is the defining tension of the modern incentive travel market. It rewards planners who can hold two ideas at once: incentive travel is worth investing in and every dollar has to be defensible. The ITI is the instrument that lets you speak to both halves of that equation with data instead of opinion.

The wellness signal you shouldn't miss

One benchmark that connects the ITI to the broader research: wellness is now embedded in the vast majority of programs — the IRF puts it at 81% in 2026. That's a structural shift in what qualifiers expect from a reward, and it shows up in the ITI's experience-design data too. The read for planners is simple: budget for restoration, not just revelry. A trip that sends people home recharged does more for retention than one that just wears them out, and the benchmarks now reflect that expectation as the norm rather than the exception.

The bottom line from ITI 2025

Incentive travel is growing more expensive, more measured, and more AI-assisted — all at once. Budgets are up 4% because the tool works and talent is scarce; planners are cutting gifting before experience because they understand what actually drives value; and AI has gone from novelty to near-universal. The planners who thrive in this environment are the ones who treat the ITI as a strategic instrument, not trivia. Pair these benchmarks with the 2026 Incentive Travel Trends Report and our analysis of the full 2026 statistics to build your case.