‘To infinity and beyond!’ – in memoriam Didier Scaillet

Pádraic Gilligan penned this fitting tribute to Didier Scaillet, a former SITE CEO, who passed away in July To infinity and beyond” was a saying that Didier often used during his tenure as CEO of SITE when I served as his CMO. It’s half quoted in his last post on Facebook, from Christmas, 2023 when he says: “Merry Christmas to all my loved ones … and beyond”. Thinking about that in the aftermath of Didier’s death makes me profoundly sad, but it also gives me real hope that Didier has finally reached his aspirational destination. Facebook and Linkedin were inundated with posts expressing shock at his passing – he was only 54 – and deep affection for who he was. And therein the challenge. Capturing who Didier was, his essence, is not so easy, for he was a many splendored thing, full of boundless confidence, on the one hand, vulnerable as a lost kitten on the other. I shared a stage this year with Didier at an industry event in Buenos Aires. He was speaking before me and I watched in awe as he did his thing, the words of Shakespeare’s Cassius ringing in my ears “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus”. Here was a person in masterful control of his subject, totally at ease. Would I, one of Shakespeare’s “petty men” ever rise to such lofty heights? I met Didier regularly at industry events and we always found time for each other. Then there were gaps after MPI and during the CLIA years when our paths didn’t cross. In 2016, we re-connected and Didier was appointed CEO of SITE in January 2018, the same month I became CMO. While it wasn’t without its challenges, I loved working with Didier. Despite being an old dog, I learned many new tricks thanks to the boundless breadth of his thinking, the limitless horizons he envisioned. Didier saw connections that others didn’t. With Didier, it was all about the ideas. Ideas cascaded out of him like water out of the rock in Psalm 105. My job, and Mark Swets’ (SITE’s head of operations), was quality control. Judging what could be done with the limited resources we had. That said, budgets and details were an irritation to him, nasty spoil sports that ruined all the fun and got in the way of what really mattered. Didier could see the exciting beginning and the glorious end. He was blind to the boring bit in the middle. One fruit of our collaboration that did get over the finish line was The Manifesto Series (Bangkok, Vancouver and Dublin), three white papers on the evolving nature and direction of the incentive travel industry. But Didier could get massively deflated if there was too much negativity in the room. He was pathologically positive and could only soar confidently when the wind was beneath his wings. He was a “go big, or go home” guy and lived in line with his stature. He was also extremely generous with his time and expertise and deeply empathetic. His last year with SITE was fraught with challenges, mainly personal, and including his own health. In her tribute to Didier, Peggy Whitman, former president of SITE, recalled a phrase that Didier used when offering condolences to friends who had lost a loved one. It’s a fitting way to conclude my own tribute: “Do not cry because it is over … Smile because it happened.”