Your Corporate Retreat Is On—But It’s Going To Be Weirder

At the last global sales meeting he attended before the pandemic, Jeff Chase went to Caesars Palace Las Vegas with about 60 colleagues, plus many of their spouses. In February, the biotech sales manager scouted a location for their next retreat, the Renaissance Aruba Resort & Casino, on Zoom. He never left his home in Indianapolis.

The woman organising the visit, travel entrepreneur Sarah Reuter, instructed him and 70 other attendees from the corporate world to locate sunglasses, a hairdryer and a refreshing drink in their homes. When the video panned to the Caribbean, they were asked to turn on their blow dryers to simulate a coastal breeze in their hair.

“Myself, no, I don’t have long hair, so I couldn’t do that part,” Mr Chase says. He still enjoyed the whirlwind tour enough that he’s planning to book one of Elevate Travel Co.’s virtual retreats for the company’s biannual sales meeting this fall.

Vaccines are now reaching many American workers, but some companies are in no rush to bring back the in-person off-site retreat. Instead, they’re turning to a host of increasingly elaborate virtual options, including murder mysteries staffed with actors, webcast trips to beach resorts and safaris, and purpose-built digital islands for multiday gatherings.

They’re not quite a substitute for the splashiest pre-pandemic corporate off-sites—where some participants might have slept in a castle or raced Fiat 500s around the Tuscan countryside—and usually require much less time and money. But they can still help employees bond and let off steam after months of working in unusual conditions, their participants say.

Sean Hoff, managing partner of Toronto-based corporate retreats company Moniker, says clients have started inquiring about in-person trips, but are holding off on deposits and flights until at least June. So he’s ploughing ahead creating a virtual island for an upcoming retreat of around 240 people for Webflow, a San Francisco website-design company.

Employees will participate in videogame-like team-building activities, including a boat-building race. They will inhabit customized avatars and gather in virtual locales like a “tiki hut” and a “treehouse” for small-group meetings.

“The HR team, for example, will be able to say, meet us over by the dock at 5 p.m.,” he says.

“I’m not going to lie, I was a little sceptical at first. But after a year of remote work I was so desperate to meet more of my colleagues that I just dived in,” says Allison Williams, an account manager based in St. Louis at Articulate, an e-learning software company. Articulate held a weeklong virtual retreat in early February with over 104 sessions, including virtual yoga and virtual escape rooms. Out of 291 employees across 10 time zones, 267 participated, according to a company spokesman.

Ms Williams taught a class to 45 colleagues on calligraphy and says she made a new friend, a “fellow pen nerd,” in the process. She also made new work friends through the happy hours at a virtual beach club staged on Remo, an online conferencing platform. There were various seating options, including a bar, fire pit, or surfboard-shaped table. Employees talked in small groups with whoever else gathered at each site.

Alejandra Sereleas, a vice president of accounting at the France-based videogame company Ubisoft, hired Moniker to stage a virtual, 1980s-themed murder mystery for her team of about 80 people last June.

The scenario is a wedding: The groom mysteriously drops dead after taking a sip of his drink. The participants meet eight suspects, all paid actors, and must interrogate them to solve the crime.

“We asked everyone to be in character and be creative, and sent them a wedding invitation before the event,” Ms Sereleas says. People embraced the theme, she says, donning side ponytails and chunky jewellery and setting ’80s-themed Zoom backgrounds like a Pac-Man maze.

After the murder mystery, which made its debut last May as Moniker’s first virtual offering, the company created a “lunar outpost disaster scenario” set in 2037. It was adapted from a NASA training exercise for aspiring astronauts. Participants act as mission control for a crew of colleagues whose exploratory trip to the moon’s surface has gone awry.

“We’ve kissed the Blarney stone in Ireland, had whiskey at the top of a mountain in Patagonia, rode on a dogsled in Finland, sailed a yacht off Cannes and hung out with a gorilla doctor in Rwanda,” says Liz Lathan, Austin, Texas-based CEO of Haute Dokimazo, an events company that pivoted to virtual experiences during the pandemic. Her corporate clients Zoomed with travel guides in 28 countries between last May and December.

Vanessa Blackburn, Cleveland-based enterprise retail strategist at Retail Zipline, a communications startup for retail stores, has already done two virtual retreats with her team. Their last off-site, planned before the pandemic, was to take place in Lake Tahoe, and Ms Blackburn hoped to tack on a few extra days to ski. Her company’s two-day virtual retreat in March struck a different tone.

Instead of lavish catered meals, employees got to spend $25 on their corporate card to order coffee and lunch delivery. And the goody bags sent to their homes included a tub of slime, a plastic Slinky toy and a colouring book—not for the workers themselves, but to occupy the young children that many still had at home. “My daughter loved that,” Ms Blackburn says.

In our 20s, my new husband and I took a year off from our fledgling careers to travel in Southeast Asia. Equipped with paper maps, we began in China and improvised each day’s “itinerary” on the go. A gap year for grown-ups, I called it, although I scarcely qualified as one.

Nearly 40 years later, we are new retirees with the same wanderlust. We wondered: Could we recapture the thrill of winging it, enduring rough roads and cheap hotels?

We could and did, but for 2½ months instead of 12. We mapped out a route that would take us up Africa’s east coast and then—who knows where? Here’s how we rolled and five important lessons we learned on a 6,000-mile trip.

Kenya: Live large by day

Our first stop was the tiny, car-free island of Lamu, well-known for its high-profile visitors, from Kate Moss to the Obamas. This low-key getaway offered white-sand beaches, dhows — boats you can rent for day cruises and snorkelling — and lots of donkeys, the main mode of transport.

We considered the beachside Peponi Hotel in Shela, a hot spot since the 1960s (Mick Jagger bunked there). But room rates start at $250, far above our per-night budget of $70 or less. When contemplating almost 100 nights of travel, price matters.

So we chose a villa in the dunes called Amani Lamu, $61 per night for an en suite room with a private terrace and shared plunge pool.
We still had a cool Peponi moment come sunset: On the hotel’s whitewashed veranda, we sipped Pepotinis and plotted our next day’s interlude at the Majlis, Lamu’s fanciest resort (from $580).

With a $20 day pass, we could lounge around its pools and beach bars like proper resort habitués.

Lesson learned: Live like billionaires by day and frugal backpackers by night.
Must-go: Across the bay on Manda Island, bunk a night in a thatched-roof bungalow on stilts at Nyla’s Guest House and Kitchen (from $48 with breakfast).
After a dinner of doro wat, a spicy Ethiopian chicken stew and rice, the sound of waves will lull you asleep.

Egypt: Ask. Politely.

From Lamu, we flew to Aswan in Egypt. Our “plan”: Cruise down the Nile to Luxor, then take a train to Cairo, and venture to Giza’s pyramids.

Turns out it’s the kind of thing one really should book in advance. But at our Aswan hostel, the proprietor, who treated us like guests deserving white-glove service, secured a felucca, a vessel manned by a navigator and captain-cum-cook.

Since we’d booked fewer than 24 hours in advance and there were no other takers, we were its sole passengers for the three-day trip.
One day, we stopped to tour ancient temples and visit a bustling camel fair, but otherwise, we remained on board watching the sunbaked desert slide by.

We slept on futons on the deck under the stars. The cost: about $100 per night per person, including three meals.

Lesson learned: Ask for help. We found Egyptians kind and unfazed by our haplessness, especially when we greeted them respectfully with assalamu alaikum (“Peace to you”).
Must-go: For buys from carpets to kebabs, don’t miss Cairo’s massive Khan el-Khalili bazaar, in business since 1382. We loved the babouche, cute leather slippers, but resisted as our packs were full.

Turkey: Heed weather reports

Next stop Tunisia, via a cheap flight on EgyptAir. We loved Tunisia, but left after six days because the weather got chilly.

Fair enough, it was January. We hopped continents by plane and landed in Istanbul, where it snowed. Fortunately, two of Istanbul’s main pleasures involve hot water. We indulged in daily hammams, or Turkish baths, ranging from $30 to $60 for services that included, variously, a massage, a scrub-down and a soak.

Beneath soaring ceilings at the temple-like Kılıç Ali Paşa Halamı, brisk workers sternly wielded linen sacks to dowse my body in a cloud of hot foam.
In between visits to Ottoman-era mosques and the city’s spice markets, we staved off the chill by drinking fruity pomegranate tea and sampling Turkish delight and baklava at tea salons.

A favourite salon: Sekerci Cafer Erol in Kadıköy, a ferry-ride away on the “Asian” side of Istanbul, where the city adjoins Asia.

Lesson learned: Pay attention to the weather gods. We foolishly took the concept of travelling off-season too far.
Must-go: Don’t miss the Istanbul Modern, the Renzo Piano-designed art museum in the historic Beyoğlu district.

Cambodia: Chill out

After a long flight from Istanbul, we spent two weeks in Laos and then hopped another plane to Cambodia, specifically Koh Rong Sanloem, another car-free island.

Like vagabonds, we lolled by the warm, super-blue water of Sunset Beach, steps from our bungalow at Sleeping Trees (from $54 per night).

A caveat: You have to sweat to get to this island paradise. We took a bus, a ferry and then hiked for 40 minutes up and down a steep hill and through a jungle. You’ll find only a handful of “resorts”—simple bungalow complexes like ours. There’s nothing much to do. I’ll be back.

Lesson learned: Until our week in Cambodia, we’d been travelling too much and too fast, prioritising exploration over relaxation. This island taught us the pleasures of stasis.
Must-go: Spend one day in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh, to delve into its sobering history. Tour the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre, site of a Killing Field, where nearly 9,000 Cambodians died.

Thailand: Be a frugal hedonist

We spent our last two weeks on the island of Ko Samui, where season three of “The White Lotus” was shot.
We went there for its astounding beauty, not the luxury resort experience that comes with too many boisterous lads on vacation, snake farms and traffic jams in town.

Truth be told, we flouted our budget rules to book an Airbnb with a pool (from $300) in the hills of Lipa Noi on the island’s quiet side. We joined the nearby Gravity Movement Gym to work out, but cooked our own meals to keep our final tabulation of expenses within reach.

Lesson learned: Pinching pennies feels restrictive, no matter how lush the surroundings. And it leads to bickering, as partners tally up who squandered how much on what.
With the end in sight, we splurged on the villa and even bought souvenirs, knowing we’d lug them for days, not weeks.
Must-go: Take the 30-minute ferry to sister island Ko Pha Ngan for its peace, love and yoga vibe and, once a month, full-moon parties.
Via Airbnb, we bunked at a Thai house called Baan Nuit, run by the Dear Phangan restaurant proprietors.

We sampled steamed dumplings, white fish in a Thai basil sauce and spicy noodles for a mere $15 apiece.
Hey, indulge in that “White Lotus” moment if you dare!