AC

Even during the recession, Jay Hagan refused to stop rewarding his top performers with free hotel stays. "It's really a relatively small part of our total employee budget and has such a big impact," says Hagan, CEO of DriveSavers Data Recovery in Novato, Calif. "It seemed even more important to continue to do it when things were slow." Now, travel industry experts say, many of Hagan's peers are again rewarding employees as corporate profits have started to rebound and the avalanche of bad publicity about employee-incentive travel has dissipated. But while reward travel is returning, they say, the trips may not be as long or as lavish as they were before. "The reality is, it's back because these programs work, especially in decentralized organizations," says Melissa Van Dyke, president of the Incentive Research Foundation. "The programs are still motivating," she says. "They're still creating experiences that are memorable and meaningful. But some of the incentives that were...