Culinary Tourism – A Growing Trend

A major and fast growing popular trend in tourism is culinary tourism. Food and wine enthusiasts travel all over the world to learn and explore the various cuisines and specialties of places round the globe. This can be seen through the ever increase of events like food, wine and beer festivals. Even our television is bombarded with various cooking contests with various best chef trophies and notable prize money.

Understanding Culinary tourism
Culinary tourism started getting popular around 2001 after Erik Wolf, President of the International Culinary Tourism Association (ICTA), presented a white paper on the subject to his organization. The paper led to the publication of a book and ultimately growing awareness and demand for culinary tours to boost the restaurant and food industry.

Today, many expert chefs and food livers travel across the globe to sample local and regional cuisine, learn techniques of cooking. With the growing trends are a number of cooking contests held where the best cook are awarded with cooking trophies and even certificates. Specialized contests and trophies are also becoming popular like baking trophies, continental trophies, cocktail and mocktail innovation trophies and various other specialized trophies. Chefs often visit other countries and even continents to be judge of such contest.

Aims of Culinary tourism
The main purpose behind all culinary tourism is simply to educate and inspire all food and wine enthusiasts to expand their knowledge on food history, cooking techniques and local food trends. Today specific culinary tours are organized which are related to a wide number of activities like cooking, wine making and sampling, food sampling, food trends etc. This has also fueled the launch and growing popularity of new food blogs and websites and even online contests. Today to spice up things, varied specific and exclusive culinary tools are organized to improve skill set of various specialized chefs. Such tours include tours like wine and brewery tours, conferences and events of culinary professionals and cookery authors, tours of restaurants and food manufacturing plants and various other knowledge enhancing and skill learning tours.

Thus it can be stated that culinary tourism and contests are not a trend to go anywhere for a long time.

Top Benefits of Corporate Awards

Today all companies, irrespective of their size and profitability are facing the challenges of increasing competitive global economy. This has forced them to buck up and initiate various strategies and tricks to grow their company’s value and edge ahead of the rest. For many, corporate awards have evolved as a highly profitable strategy with high profitability. Let’s look into some of the benefits behind this strategy. 

It reinforces corporate direction
These awards have shown to provide a big boost to any company’s endeavor towards ethical behavior or corporate leadership. Initiating an award program in sync with the company’s aims and objectives help getting the corporate directive aims achieved.

Retain and attract talent
Any company’s success depends on its work force. Retaining and nurturing talent as well as attracting fresh talent is one of the major policies of any company. Recognizing and appreciating talent and hard work of employees through various awards programs not only motives the winner to perform better but also inspires other employees to attain that level. Through word of mouth, these programs also add a vote of confidence among the new applicants for a job in the organization.

They help facilitate sales advantage
Rewards and recognitions are an excellent tool to boost the overall sales of a company and establish a market lead beyond competition. It motivates every sales agent to surpass his talent and over achieve his target.

Expand public relations
The free publicity, appreciation, credibility and the new business that the rewards and recognition policy brings is unmatchable. Various corporate competitions like a contest for the best entrepreneur, best manager, best performer of the week, month and even year and other such similar awards creates a positive and favorable impression of the company in the market. Working like an added PR, it gives any company an unmatched mileage and advantage.

Bottom line
The power of the rewards and accolades are often underestimated. However, they can really open doors for any company in the marketplace and earn them credibility and favorable impression as well as new business. Simultaneously, it allows them to get a critical view of their internal performance and improve it by leaps and bounds.

Tips on Promoting Employee Engagement

The Importance of employee engagement cannot be highlighted enough. Better engagement of the employees, leads to higher productivity, lower attrition rate, satisfied customers and overall a good business index on almost all parameters. Today almost all companies, big or small takes time to build a comprehensive engagement strategy. Apart from that, implementing these tips and tactics would surely enhance the employee satisfaction rate.

The leader to be the role-model
There is no better and more effective strategy than ‘walking the walk.’ The characteristics and the behavior demonstrated by the topmost tier is the walking example that employees would naturally or tends to copy. Thus  a disciplined, courteous, polite, hard working and fair top tier are a mandatory requisite for any organization.

Offer Visibility and Accessibility
The top management’s functioning should be transparent to the employees as well as accessible for both guidance and assistance. They should be seen moving around or working in open spaces instead of closed doors and protected areas. They should be recognizing any employee’s outstanding work publicly. This would motivate employees to perform better and earn the appreciation of the boss.

Organize team activities
Every organization needs its workers to work as a team and give maximum output. Fun in the workplace is also another very important objective that must be accomplished. Both these aims are successfully realized by team bonding events like organizing a rugby tournament or any other team sport tournament. Giving away rugby trophies would be a feather in the cap .They would serve as living mementoes and encourage team spirit and working together as one unit for a long long time.

Make saying ‘Thank You’ a regular habit
The most common and the gravest mistake made in an organization is the omission of acknowledging an employee’s hard work and saying Thank You. Acknowledging and stating this simple word can be the foolproof way of inspiring trust and confidence, energize and motivate the entire workplace and even restore strained relationships.

Apart from these there are many traits like authenticity, flexibility, volunteering and covering for each other can go ahead and build a long and trusting relationship.