About
WHEXT 2026 was a corporate offsite event in Sri Lanka, organized by BrandAid events for FIRSTCUT DESIGN STUDIO, GainAccess and BrandAid teams to connect and engage.
CUSTOMER STORY
WHEXT 2026: What Happens When Attendees Drive the Experience
76 event app users
3000+ notifications viewed
203 interactions per user
Company Size
100–150
Industry
Event Services
Location
Sri Lanka
Website
https://www.brandaid.in/
Problem
Incentive trips cost more per head than any other event format and prove less. You fly a group to a fancy destination to make them feel valued and get them to bond with each other. Then you go home with a stack of receipts and a “feeling.”
BrandAid Events knew the feeling well and were looking to solve for:
- Having numbers that justified the trip’s budget. Every incentive trip they'd done before had active participation in the room but was never measured.
- Keeping the energy high during the dead times - before the trip (airports, transfers), the hours between sessions. And most important - capture the high at the end of the trip to drive employee-generated stories organically.
Solution
For WHEXT 2026, BrandAid Events ran the whole trip through one event app. This gave the team a single place to gather every data point across every leg of the journey.
- A live Feed where attendees posted their own moments.
- Gamified challenges themed to the trip’s sports-league concept: quizzes, prediction polls, caption contests.
- A leaderboard that turned taking part into a real competition.
- Notifications that ran logistics and communications (like airport timing, dress-code prompts, etc) - without a coordinator chasing anyone.
The stress-test happened before the event even started
Just before departure, a 4-hour flight delay hit. Instead of filling group chats with questions and complaints, attendees stayed active inside the app.
The leaderboard was alive - challenges were running, attendees were competing, and sharing photos on the Feed. They were bonding over scores before the offsite even began.
"The leaderboard brought out everyone's competitive side... Our flight was delayed by almost four hours, but instead of hearing complaints, everyone was glued to the app. Someone caught a group asleep in departure-lounge chairs and posted it. It became the most-liked photo of the trip."
- Ujjwal Bhimrajka, BrandAid Events
They didn't have to manage the delayed flight chaos. The app took care of it for them.
For the first time, they had data to learn from.
BrandAid's past trips left no record at all. There was nothing to measure against, because nothing had ever been measured. WHEXT 2026 changed that.
When WHEXT wrapped, there were 15000+ interactions on the event app, with the Feed driving 50% of it.
This is the kind of data an organizer can show to the leadership to prove that the “expensive” incentive trip did its job. Beyond that, they can also see what worked, what resonated with the group, and use those insights to plan their next trip.
Key takeaways for incentive-trip organizers
- Build the connection layer to meet where your attendees are. In this case, the attendees of the trip were a group of GenZs and millennials. So, emulating a social feed experience made it natural for them to engage during the trip.
- Start before Day 1. If you’re just hoping for engagement to start at the venue, you've lost hours. Here, the flight delay didn't kill momentum because the trip experience was already live.
- Make attendees the content engine. Self-posted moments bond a group better than produced content. On this trip, 50% of the group’s experience lived on the app’s feed.
- Measure behavior, not satisfaction. A 5-star rating is easy to give and easy to discount. While direct feedback is critical, use sentiment analysis and interactions in the app to determine behavioural patterns.
