The Akoakoa Approach
We take care of all the details. Transportation, lodging, work materials, extra monitors, even groceries and meal/activity reservations. The perfect location, complex logistics, and even meeting facilitation are all turnkey if you need them to be. Just focus on what’s important: getting together.
📍 Location
Part of Akoakoa’s secret sauce is helping you find the right retreat location - whether you’re organizing an executive retreat, a team offsite, or planning customer meetings in a specific city.
How to pick a retreat location
We’ll help identify the right place for your retreat, whether that’s in a dense city or somewhere more secluded like a resort town in the Rockies or the highlands of the Big Island. There is no one-size-fits-all location for the perfect retreat, and we’ve planned retreats everywhere from Paris to Tulum to Aspen. We’ll consider a few factors as we come up with the perfect location suggestions for your team. If your team is concentrated in a specific geography (e.g. West Coast heavy) we can find somewhere close by for convenience, or somewhere more novel to get everyone out of their comfort zone. A small-team executive retreat might be better suited to a secluded resort town, while a larger team might be easier to house in a city with multiple hotel options.
Where to stay for a company retreat
The world is your oyster. Our team’s travel experts have stayed at the world’s nicest vacation rentals, most established hotel brands, and are experts in how to balance the different workspace and lodging needs of different kinds of teams. If you’re a small startup founded by a few close friends, an intimate vacation rental with great space for collaborative work might be the perfect fit, and we’ve vetted the best ones on the market. If you’re a larger company getting your team together for bonding, a hotel may be the most flexible option. Either way, we’ll make sure your space is outfitted for your needs, with the right work materials or fun stuff for team bonding.
How to plan an executive retreat
It can be hard to come up with ideas for executive retreats. The C-suite comes with its own set of needs, from optimizing for frequent flyer status to finding a discreet luxury venue for mission-critical planning. We’ve been there. We’ll support executive assistants or event coordinators on your team to make sure your executive retreat is a success at every step of the way.
✈️ Logistics
Whether you’re planning a retreat for a big, distributed team or organizing a strategy session for the C-suite, logistics are make-or-break. Akoakoa’s travel experts make sure no detail goes unaddressed.
Flights, travel, and lodging
Managing the bare necessities of a retreat - making sure flights are properly booked, hotels or lodging are squared away, and ground transportation is arranged - can be a full-time job. We’ll handle it. For bigger groups, we can coordinate group tickets with airlines, and for the most demanding travelers, we can make sure frequent flyer or hotel status is optimized for. Our pre-vetted lodging options mean there’s no fretting about whether a space will be a good fit for your group.
How to get work necessities in place
Thinking about how to make sure your group can be productive, collaborative, and comfortable on a retreat is tough. Hotel conference facilities may not be a good fit for smaller groups, but many vacation rental properties lack the infrastructure for productivity and collaboration. We solve for that by collaborating with local coworking spaces, more intimate meeting venues, and boutique hotels to make sure your team has the right space to work no matter where you’re staying. For smaller teams seeking to get work done in a vacation rental, we’ll send external monitors, projectors, whiteboards, markers, and any other tools you might need to the house to make sure you have everything you need.
Planning a solid retreat itinerary
You’re dedicating significant budget to get everyone together in person for a reason. You have goals. A well-planned itinerary, including the right activities, exercises, and meals, is critical. How do you balance work projects you need to get done with the right level of hanging out, bonding, and activities? We’ve expert-planned dozens of retreats for teams of all sizes. We can help. We can provide custom agendas, facilitation guides for different kinds of workshops and sessions, and even live remote or in-person facilitation if that’s what you’re looking for.
🔧 Facilitation
Akoakoa does things a little bit differently from other retreat or event planning companies.
Pushing company goals forward
We believe in the power of the right agenda, facilitation tools, or even a professional facilitator on-site or over Zoom to help your team make the most of your investment in getting together. It might be as simple as knowing how to spend your time on the right things, or having the right frameworks to do what you need to do - whether that’s a sales strategy brainstorm, user research interviews, company mission-setting, or just plain fun. But we also know the power of transformative professional facilitation, and can set your group up with the right person if needed.
Getting the most of your time
How do you plan effective workshops, exercises, and activities for your team? If you’d like, we can go beyond booking flights and team-friendly lodging: we’ll craft a custom agenda that makes sure you’re striking the right balance and allocating time in line with your goals. We’ll make sure you use your precious time together without burning out.
How to enjoy the place you’re in
One of the most beautiful things about a well-crafted retreat is the opportunity to get folks out of comfort zones, familiar places, and entrenched patterns and try new things. You’re in a new city, or a beautiful natural setting. You’re here to push the boundaries. We’ve spent considerable time in each of the locales in which we plan retreats, and we’ll make sure you’re getting the most out of unique, local experiences by setting you up with authentic places to stay, eat, work, and play - all with a refreshing sense of place.
