One team, three countries.
InspireME works across Monaco, France and Italy, and covers all three itself. The company is based in the Principality, works the coast either side of it in France, and in Italy goes back to Florence in 1969, where the production side of the business began.
A programme that crosses them stays with the same team from the first call to the last night.
The network
A programme is only as good as the people brought in to run it.
The crews, technicians and specialists we work with are among the best on this coast, and most of them have worked with this family for the better part of their careers. Several go back further than the company itself. They know the standard we hold to because they helped set it.
It shows in the room. Lighting that lands on the first cue. Service that moves without anyone noticing it move. A closing night that guests are still talking about years later, and clients who come back and ask for the same people.
Production crews
Technical suppliers
Venue and hotel teams
Transport
Artists and agents
Guides
Caterers
Florists
Security
The standard Miek set
Miek was thinking about this long before the industry gave it a name. She sat on the international board of SITE and led much of its work on sustainability and social responsibility, at a point when almost nobody in this market was asking the question at all.
Her way into a programme always started with the place itself. What is already here. Who already does this well. What will still be here after everyone has gone home. She did not treat a destination as a backdrop to be dressed for three days and then left.
So the suppliers are local, because someone who lives forty minutes away knows which road floods, which terrace loses the sun at seven, and which family owns the house that is on no list. What a programme needs is found nearby rather than shipped in, and what is built for it goes back into use afterwards rather than into a skip on the Monday.
She held the whole company to that, including the parts of a programme no client would ever see, and she was not interested in whether it was the easier way to work. It usually was not.
It is still the standard this company measures itself against.
Every programme is built for you
There is no template here and no catalogue to choose from. Every programme is designed around one company, one group and one objective, and it is built from nothing each time.
What follows is not a fixed sequence. Some programmes take a year and four site visits, others come together in six weeks, and the order changes with what each one needs. The amount of work does not, and neither does what it is for: a few days the people in the room are still talking about years afterwards.
Understanding the brief
Before anything is proposed we ask what the programme is actually for. Not the theme, the objective. Who is in the room, what they are being rewarded or prepared for, and what the client will be judged on afterwards. A brief taken at face value becomes a programme that changes three times, and the changes are never free.
Standing in the space
Nothing goes into a proposal that we have not stood in ourselves. We walk the arrival, the room, the route between them and the load-in door, at the hour of day the group will be there. Terraces that photograph well at noon are in shade by seven. Coaches that fit on the map do not always fit on the road.
The days themselves
We are there. Not a coordinator sent in our place. The rehearsal, the back of the room on the night, the reconciliation afterwards line by line. If something has to change while it is running, it changes without a meeting about who is responsible for it.
Credentials
Memberships
SITE, Society for Incentive Travel Excellence
ADMEI, Association of Destination Management Executives International
Monaco Welcome and Business Office
Recognition
Condé Nast Traveler Top Travel Specialist, 2020
Charity work
Andrea Bocelli Foundation
Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation
Selected clients
3M, Alitalia, Allianz, Amway, Audi, Bulgari, Carlson, Daimler, Ernst & Young, Fiat, GE, Iveco, L’Oréal, Magneti Marelli, Menarini, Mercedes, Monte-Carlo SBM, New York University, Nissan, Pam, PricewaterhouseCoopers, RAI, Xerox, Yacht Club Costa Smeralda
Tell us what the programme has to do.
Come to us as early as you like, with as little settled as you like. You will get somewhere it can happen, a way to build it, and the people who will make it work.
The people who answer are the people who will run it.