Why Travel Experiences Outperform Objects as Live Auction Items

Choosing your live auction items can be one of the harder parts of planning a fundraising event. You need something people genuinely want, but you also need to think about how it will work once it’s actually put in front of a room full of bidders. Will several people want it? Does it feel special enough for the live auction? Can your auctioneer get people excited about it? And, ultimately, is it going to raise enough money to justify its place in the catalog?

We’ve been on the committee side of those conversations ourselves. Before Saskia, we were involved in planning charity galas and asking many of the same questions our clients ask us now, so we know how easy it is to get caught up in finding impressive items without stopping to think about what people will actually bid on.

These days, we obviously still have a soft spot for travel. We wouldn’t have built a business around it otherwise. But that doesn’t mean we think every vacation package will outperform every physical item. What we have seen is that the right travel experience has some advantages that make it particularly well suited to a live auction.

Why travel can work so well as a live auction item

One of our favorite examples involved a stay at a French château combined with a private Champagne experience. The package had a consignment cost of around $7,000 and sold at auction for $20,000, which would have been a fantastic result on its own.

What made that particular auction interesting, though, was that there were other bidders who wanted the trip too. Because the package could be fulfilled more than once, the organization was able to offer it to three bidders at $20,000 each, resulting in around $60,000 in sales from what had started as a single auction lot.

That’s one of the biggest differences between consignment travel experiences and physical auction items. If you’re auctioning a painting, a watch, or a signed piece of memorabilia, there’s only one available and the sale is finished once the highest bidder wins. With a travel package that can be fulfilled multiple times, strong competition in the room can potentially turn into a second or even third sale.

Of course, that doesn’t happen with every package or at every event. You need an experience people genuinely want and, crucially, more than one bidder willing to pay for it. But when those things come together, it gives a nonprofit an opportunity that most physical items simply can’t offer.

People can picture themselves on the trip

There is also a much simpler reason we like experiences at live auctions: they’re exciting.

Put a week in Tuscany on the screen and people immediately start imagining themselves there — who they’d take, when they could go, and what it might actually be like to stay in that villa, visit the wineries or spend an afternoon truffle hunting.

That emotional connection matters because people aren’t simply deciding what an item is worth; they’re deciding how much they want the experience being described to them. It isn’t just a live-auction observation, either. Researchers Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich, in a widely cited study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that people consistently report more happiness from experiential purchases than material ones, and are far more likely to keep thinking back on them months later. A good auctioneer can build on that, particularly when several people in the room have already decided they don’t want somebody else walking away with the trip.

Physical items can absolutely create the same reaction. A signed jersey could be incredibly desirable in a room full of fans, while a piece by a sought-after artist could have several people competing for it. The important part isn’t whether something is technically an object or an experience, but whether enough people in your particular room want it.

Travel often has an advantage here because the potential audience can be much broader.

Physical items tend to have a more obvious price

Another consideration is how easily bidders can attach a dollar value to what you’re selling. If a watch normally retails for $3,000, most people either know roughly what it’s worth or can find out very quickly, and that retail price can become an unofficial ceiling in their minds.

That doesn’t mean someone won’t happily pay more than retail at a charity auction. Supporting the organization is part of the reason they’re bidding in the first place, and plenty of donors are comfortable paying above market value because they know where the additional money is going. Even so, there is usually a recognizable price attached to the item.

Experiences can be less straightforward. A private chef dinner might have an individual value, as might a villa stay or a private tasting, but once those elements become part of a larger trip, bidders aren’t necessarily making a simple retail-price comparison. They’re considering the experience as a whole, particularly when it includes things they couldn’t easily recreate by making a few bookings themselves.

Not every travel package makes a great auction item

This is where we think nonprofits need to be a little careful, because simply putting a vacation into the auction doesn’t automatically make it one of your best live auction items. A generic hotel stay with lots of restrictions isn’t going to create a bidding war just because the description calls it a luxury getaway.

In our experience, the strongest travel packages are easy to understand and have something specific that makes people pay attention. “Seven nights in a private Tuscan villa for six people” immediately gives your guests something they can picture, while details such as a private chef, vineyard visit or truffle-hunting experience give your auctioneer something tangible to talk about.

Specifics nearly always work harder than adjectives. Telling guests they’ll enjoy “world-class dining and unforgettable experiences” doesn’t really tell them anything, whereas telling them a private chef is coming to the villa to cook dinner gives them a much clearer idea of what they’re bidding on.

It’s also important to think about whether the experience actually suits your audience. If you’re fundraising in a room full of serious golfers, an exceptional golf trip could be one of the most competitive items of the evening. For another organization, a food-and-wine experience in Italy or France might be far more appealing. The best live auction items aren’t necessarily the most expensive ones; they’re the ones that the people attending your event genuinely want.

Don’t overlook the practical details

Restrictions can make a big difference to how comfortable somebody feels bidding on travel. If a donor is considering spending a significant amount of money on a trip, the last thing you want is for them to start wondering whether they’ll actually be able to use it.

Short redemption periods, extensive blackout dates and complicated booking rules can all make an otherwise appealing package less attractive. A one-year redemption window, for example, can be surprisingly restrictive once people factor in work, school calendars, other vacations and the schedules of everyone else travelling with them.

It’s one of the reasons Saskia packages come with a four-year redemption window. Giving people more flexibility removes one potential reason to stop bidding and, just as importantly, makes the eventual trip easier for the winning donor to plan.

Should travel go in the live or silent auction?

There’s definitely a place for travel in both, but we’d think carefully before putting your biggest travel experience into the silent auction simply because there’s space for it.

Silent auctions can work brilliantly for restaurant certificates, spa treatments, wine, smaller experiences, and donated products. For a higher-value travel package with broad appeal, however, the live auction gives you something the silent auction can’t: an auctioneer who can sell the experience.

They can talk about the destination, draw attention to the most interesting parts of the package, see who’s bidding, and give someone the opportunity to change their mind and raise their paddle one more time. If you’ve got a genuinely exciting travel experience and several likely bidders in the room, that’s an opportunity worth using.

So, is travel better than physical live auction items?

In our experience, yes, more often than not, and it comes down to structure rather than taste. A good travel package can appeal to several people at once, it doesn’t always have an obvious retail ceiling, it gives your auctioneer plenty to work with, and in some cases, it can be sold more than once. Those are real, repeatable advantages, and they’re the reason we’d point a nonprofit toward travel more often than not when a big-ticket live auction item is on the table.

That doesn’t mean a physical item can’t hold its own. An exceptional one, courtside tickets to a playoff game, a genuinely rare piece of memorabilia, dinner with a chef nobody in town can usually get near, can absolutely be the highlight of the evening, and we’d always rather see a nonprofit lead with something extraordinary than force a mediocre trip into the lineup just because someone told them travel sells. Travel’s edge isn’t that it’s inherently more exciting than a great object. It’s that its advantages show up more reliably, package after package, than they do with objects.

When we’re helping organizations think about their live auction, one of the most useful questions isn’t simply, “What can we get?” It’s “What would the people in this room be genuinely disappointed not to win?” More often than not, in our experience, the answer turns out to be a trip.

If you’re considering travel for your next event, explore Saskia’s charity auction travel packages to see the experiences currently available.

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