When HON, a manufacturer of office furniture, was looking for a destination for the 30th anniversary of its dealer principal sales incentive program, Team Up With HON, the company knew it needed to do something special. So the program planning started nearly three years out, rather than the usual one and a half, says Dick O’Connor, senior account manager at Maritz Motivation Solutions, which manages the program.
“Because of HON's vast travel background — they have been to six out of seven continents — they wanted to go someplace new, that these people probably wouldn't go on their own, and that offered some unique activities,” he says. “That is how they came to pick Monaco.”
It didn’t hurt that Monaco is celebrating its own anniversary this year. It was 150 years ago that the tiny and fairly quiet principality invented Monte-Carlo, building a grand, palatial casino and founding the Société des Bains de Mer, which quickly built the equally palatial Hôtel de Paris in Place du Casino square. Other grand hotels, restaurants and cultural facilities followed, and today Monaco is an incentive destination that has nearly unlimited cachet as a luxury European destination, complete with Ferrari traffic jams, billionaire’s yachts, and even a fairy tale princess.
In a country that’s barely three quarters of a square mile, Monte-Carlo SBM, as the Société des Bains de Mer is now known, dominates, running the five casinos, four hotels including the flagship Hotel de Paris Monte-Carlo, and several restaurants, nightclubs, spas and sporting facilities. SBM and the other top hotels all work with the Monaco Tourist Office to offer dollar-denominated group pricing, to keep exchange rate concerns to a minimum. One of those hotels is the four-star Fairmont Monte Carlo, overlooking the Port Hercule Yacht Basin. At 602 rooms and 18 meeting rooms, the Fairmont is the largest meetings property on the Riviera. It is also where HON chose to stay.
HON the Go
The activities for HON’s 242 attendees relied on the principality’s position between the French and Italian borders, which are so close a 20-minute drive will put you in all three countries, and without border checkpoints.
“Monte Carlo and the area surrounding it is just great,” O’Connor says. “We were there for five nights and could’ve spent another two days there and not run out of things to do. We held French cooking classes, which filled up immediately and were the rave of the [post-event] comments. We went to an outdoor French market in Nice, to Cannes to see where the film festival is held, and the famous beaches. In Antibes we went to a costume museum and an absinthe tasting, which is really cool and different.”
Another excursion was to Èze, a medieval walled village on a mountaintop, where attendees wandered the historic streets and visited the Fragonard perfume factory, where they had the opportunity to mix their own scents.
The group was photographed on the steps of the Casino de Monte-Carlo, where the grandly decorated gaming rooms underwent a major restoration last year. This was followed by a cocktail reception in the casino’s grand foyer (the gaming rooms didn’t close a single day during World War II, and they wont close for your private event either), and a walk of a few dozen yards to the famous Café de Paris, where HON held its recognition banquet. “It was in the Empire Room, which is just a stunning room with gold inlay, mirrors, and frescos,” O’Connor says. “There were about a dozen award winners. We used a custom-blown 16-inch plate/art piece instead of the typical plaque — we had that produced in one of the little towns out there, Viot.