Experience Bonus: Hiking Edition

Whether it’s taking an international vacation, learning to ski, going on your honeymoon, having a relaxing spa weekend, or some out-of-the-box idea, the Experience Bonus has you covered. We created the Qualtrics Experience Bonus so that each one of us can make our dream experience a reality. 

Welcome back to our continuing series highlighting the top experience bonuses! For this story, we are featuring Kaitlin's story. Kaitlin works in our London office and she used her Experience Bonus to take an epic hiking trip. Here's her story: 

After years of Qualtrics being on my radar I was so excited to join the team. The culture and interview experience gave me high expectations although they were exceeded on day one when I joined our Qubie Onboarding camp and heard of our yearly experience bonus. Already I started brainstorming and wishing I was better at skiing or snowboarding to spend my experience bonus there.

Fast forward a couple of months after a trip to Tenerife where I went with friends on a beautiful hike, I was so impressed with what this part of the world could offer in terms of moderate seaside cliff hikes with phenomenal views. I also love going on an activity holiday so I began researching Madeira, a small island off the coast of Portugal. It seemed perfect, with multiple routes and variations depending on physical fitness and endurance but also offering cute seaside villages, natural sea pools and some stunning waterfall walks for the days where we didn’t want to scale a mountain top. 

When we started looking up accommodation, flights and car rentals I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to use my Experience Bonus as we planned to take the trip in October and I had just claimed my experience bonus in July. Thanks to our Wellness Bonus through Forma, I was also able to expense some of the hiking gear and then we were on our way. 

For me a holiday is lovely in the sunshine, but I do like to stay active so this hiking holiday seemed to be the perfect fit! The island itself was like nothing I’d seen before with incredible heights to drive from one small town to another via a lot of tunnels built in the last couple of years. The beauty of these little villages was complemented by the ever changing weather conditions. Madeira is famous for having every season in one day and we certainly experienced this. 

It’s worth noting that I do have a fear of heights in certain situations. I didn’t expect this fear to impact one of the flatter waterfall walks that we went on. This walk was through a forest with a small section along a path that had a drop down into a valley. I couldn’t route my mind to overcome this fear. My boyfriend was trying to distract me from the fear I had, but it was only once I got back to the car that I vocalised how much the fear impacted my enjoyment of the walk we went on. I was consistently catastrophising throughout the walk and thinking the worst. While it wasn’t an irrational worry, I do think I was overweighting the worst case scenario. I need to take this learning into everyday living as I am guilty of overthinking and worrying too much about scenarios that never come to fruition. It’s crazy how vocalising this experience only made me hear how I had spiraled beyond enjoyment so it’s always best to air your concerns with somebody trusted to make sure it doesn’t impact personal and professional lives!