How To Budget For An Offsite, Company Retreat, or Conference (Template Included)

"Must Haves", "Nice to Haves", and Other Potential Expenses To Budget For

Our average client, over 250+ retreats planned, is spending around $2200/person/offsite.

Some of our competitors may have you believe this is too little for planning an impactful, transformative team retreat.

However, those same providers will charge you a percentage of your total spend, or add processing fees and endless “add-ons” to their service offers in order to get you to spend more money.

That’s why Offsite charges a flat-fee, per-person, for our end-to-end offsite planning services to give you the most transparent pricing in the industry.

For our marketplace, it’s free to make an account and any platform fees you might incur are charged only upon a successful booking of an offsite vendor, made transparent in every proposal you receive from the 1000+ curated venues listed on Offsite (with whom we’ve pre-negotiated 20-40% or more off room blocks, meeting space, F&B, and more).

Whether you work with Offsite, plan your own team retreats, or decide to work with another provider (despite the fact it will make me cry profusely, lol), we wanted to provide you some insight into how you should budget for offsites in this post.

START HERE: Offsite’s free budgeting template.

Download for free to see how we’ve helped save our clients over $3,000,000 by breaking down every major line item of team retreat budgeting.

Must-Have Budget Items

• Rooms - every offsite requires a place for people to sleep. Booking room blocks with hotels can be pricey, ambiguous, and time-consuming, which is why we decided to build our Airbnb-style marketplace to solve this problem and help you save 20-40% on this “must-have” expense before focusing on other spend categories. When you plan an offsite, you must also consider:

  • Taxes

  • Gratuities

  • Resort Fees

  • Additional room nights for those traveling from afar, who may need time to acclimate to your offsite destination or catch the following day’s flight when leaving

• Travel - everyone will either fly, drive, or take public transit to your offsite. For flights, you may wish to budget for baggage fees, unfortunate cancellations or flight changes, or any fees incurred with travel providers, agents, or software tools like Navan. You may wish to get insurance as well.

• Food and Beverage - pretty self-explanatory, but be sure to budget for…

  • 3 meals on full days,

  • 1 or 2 meals during travel days to/from your offsite,

  • snacks,

  • drinks, and especially alcohol

  • “per diems” when people are traveling to/from the offsite and get snacks or meals in the airport and/or while traveling to the event

There are “cheap” ways to do all these things, but they are generally unavoidable “must have” budget items.

Nice-To-Have Budget Items

• Meeting Space - dedicated space for strategic planning, cross-department collaboration, icebreakers, skill-building, or whatever your offsite agenda calls for.

  • You should negotiate your meeting space and can often get these fees reduced or waived with your venue in exchange for larger Food and Beverage orders, larger room blocks, or for simply bringing your business to that venue over another provider.

• Food and Beverage On-Site - time is money, so it is nice to have catered meals for parts of your offsite rather than having to walk around town or drive for sit-down meals at places that may be too small for your group, and/or will take too much time out of your agenda.

  • You should also negotiate your F&B minimums and only (one of a mixture of) breakfasts, lunches, and snacks to keep costs low if you’re on a tight budget. Many times, meals will be cheaper away from the hotel, but you have to plan accordingly regarding your offsite agenda. For example, planning dinners away from your hotel or meeting space works well because you can have “flex time” beforehand as a break, then schedule time to walk or travel to dinner, leaving unscheduled time after dinner.

• Activities - line items here can vary from free/cheap (like volunteering, or going for hikes) to extravagant (like chartering a yacht or racing supercars). Based on the goals and budget for your offsite, you’ll spend differently.

  • For example, Executive Team Retreats may incorporate cold plunges, group workouts, and yoga classes to keep everyone energized during big workdays, followed by a wine tasting to unwind. A President’s Club may ditch the meeting space requirements and reinvest funds in more splashy activities to encourage their sales teams to do well again the following year (so they can get invited to future President’s Clubs trips).

• Speakers and Facilitators - this is something I personally believe is a GREAT investment if you can convince your CEO or manager of the value. Like executive coaching can help steer leaders, an outside facilitator can help guide offsite attendees to more productive, vulnerable, and fulfilling conversations. This can also include skill-building workshops and even the occasional rah rah keynote speaker - they all have their place. More often than not, this investment will have higher ROI than most line items in your budget.

• On-the-Ground Event Production Support - worst case, you’re investing in an “insurance policy” and your on-the-ground support doesn’t do much for you. Best case, your event producer(s) can help with set-up, directing traffic, getting last-minute supplies, ushering people to breakout rooms and main meeting area sessions to stay on-agenda, navigate last-minute cancellations or delays from vendors, and more.

  • Many of our Offsite venues will provide their own on-the-ground support, and we do so as well (at no additional cost) for groups of 100+.

  • For groups less than 100, we can offer on-the-ground support between $500-$2000 per person, per day depending on how skilled of a producer you need (ie do you need someone who is an “assistant” type or someone who can facilitate and “MC” from stage, with decades of experience?)

Other Budget Items To Consider

• Swag - give your team (or attendees) something to remember your offsite by! Can be T-Shirts, or backpacks, or water bottles. We recommend going with something useful instead of flimsy or whimsical.

  • We partner with Swag.com and have our own “Swag Space” you’re free to use for your swag needs! Head to offsite.swag.space and use the code Offsite10 for 10% off your first order.

• Photographers and/or Videographers - commemorate the “fun” of your offsite while also investing in employer marketing materials. Photos and videos of people laughing and having fun at your offsites can draw candidates to your company and entice them to apply for new roles.

  • For client-facing events where you are selling memberships or tickets to events, this is even more important, because you’re selling an experience. For example, check out this YPO event we planned recently. Tell me with a straight face you don’t want to become a YPO member and attend some of their future events after seeing what they/we planned for attendees!

• Photographers and/or Videographers - commemorate the “fun” of your offsite while also investing in employer marketing materials. Photos and videos of people laughing and having fun at your offsites can draw candidates to your company and entice them to apply for new roles.

• Event Supplies - this can be a wide range of things from paper, sharpies, name tags, and other “basics” to full-on decorations, signage, awards, lanyards, and other conference or trade show type materials. These can add up!

There are so many other random line items we’ve seen make their way into offsite budgets - things like donations, event insurance, travel visas, car rentals, A/V, incidentals, etc.

Do your best to plan for every line item in your budget (our free template can help!), then add a contingency fund (perhaps 20% of your budget) for any overages or surprises.

Don’t forget the biggest “expense” of all….

Time Is You & Your Team’s Most Valuable Resource

If you are planning an offsite, you are committing 50-250+ hours of your own time to planning an engaging, cost-effective, and high ROI retreat if you plan internally.

You are also investing anywhere from 20-40+ hours of salaried time per employee who attends your offsite based on how many days your offsite is.

Use your time (and your team’s time) wisely!

Plan offsites well and they will become the cultural building-blocks for your company. You’ll recruit, engage, and retain top talent while keeping them aligned, happy, and productive for years to come.

Plan offsites poorly and you’ll lose the engagement, trust, and interest of your team who would rather open a new tab on their computers and start searching for new jobs.

We can help you run more effective and engaging offsites like we do for hundreds of award-winning employers. If you’re interested in learning more about our end-to-end offsite planning services, simply email jared@offsite.com and tell me what type of offsite you are planning.

You can also make a free account at offsite.com, to leverage our marketplace when searching for your team retreat or conference venue. This will save you countless hours on some of your “must have” budget items by giving you 20-40%+ off room blocks, meeting space, Food and Beverage, and more.

Hope this was helpful. Thanks for reading!

-Jared