Whether you’re planning your own offsite and wish to learn some of our “pro-tips” after planning hundreds of team retreats for clients, or you are considering working with us via our done-for-you services, we have something special for you!
I asked Kristin Hoogheem, our Head of Marketplace to walk us through how she’s architected our curated marketplace, the “early days” of building partnerships with top hotel groups worldwide, the benefits of our marketplace to Offsite clients and users, and what’s next for our marketplace team.
Offsite is also partnering with Ask A Chief of Staff, the go-to community for “people leaders” who serve as Chiefs of Staff (or desire to do so in the future) on the first-ever Chief of Staff Offsite Survey.
If you could take 3 minutes to fill it out, we will share anonymized data back with you through a lovely, easy-to-share-with-your-team report so you can be better informed about the average budgets, offsite duration, locations, and more across dozens of like-minded companies. Click here to take the survey, and thank you.
Kristin covers the following for us:
her background planning corporate travel for Fortune 500s and running her own luxury travel agency before joining Offsite
the “early days” of building the Offsite marketplace based on user feedback and providing custom venues searches
how we developed a curated marketplace by building relationships with boutique hotel brands
the benefits of our marketplace including massive room block and meeting space discounts, favorable and pre-negotiated contract terms, faster reply times to requests for proposals (RFPs), and more.
“what’s next” for the Offsite marketplace after crossing over 1000 venues in our marketplace globally this month
And so much more…
We didn’t want to share ALL our trade secrets, and I only asked for about 20 minutes of Kristin’s time for this interview, but if you enjoy this, please let us know at jared@offsite.com so we can make more content like this in the future.
Click below to watch our interview!
Planning an offsite, team retreat, or conference?
Whenever you plan offsites in the future, make a free account at offsite.com to search our curated marketplace with ~1000 amazing offsite venues globally where you can save 20%-40+ savings on room blocks, meeting space, and more.
Plus, we offer end-to-end offsite planning services if you want a “done for you” experience. See why hundreds of companies like Buffer, 15Five, HiBob, Metabase, Hampton, and others trust Offsite for their team retreats.
Thanks for reading!
-Jared
Below is a transcript of the interview (it was a ~20 min convo). I fed the interview into Otter.ai, and while I took a few minutes to break up some sentences for readability, I didn’t edit everything perfectly (the AI was supposed to do that, lol!). It’s hopefully “good enough” if you prefer to read the transcript, or you can watch the interview above.
JARED - Alright, I'm here with Kristen. I was able to get her off of other work for a few minutes. And yeah, I'm really excited to dive into this…I haven't interviewed you ever in like 12 years of going you?
But I would love if you could tell the people a little bit more about yourself and how you ended up at offsite?
KRISTIN - Yes. Hello, I'm Kristin. Yeah, super excited to be here and share a little more about marketplace. And also Yeah, a little bit about myself. I have a background for the last decade working in travel. So worked for a large company where we planned incentive trips and conferences for Fortune 500 companies. So I’m really familiar with the event planning process there.
After that I had a luxury leisure travel company where I helped CEOs, thought leaders, individuals plan vacations and trips, also small groups with that. And then what led me to Offsite was, it was shortly after the pandemic, and I saw that Jared was, you know, leading this new company, basically to help remote hybrid workers and just more people connect.
And that's definitely something that I'm passionate about is bringing people together for unique shared experiences. I think there's just nothing better really than helping people connect and learn about not only the world, but like connecting amazing places and just share things together. So I started Yeah, talking more about talking more about that with Jared, I'm actually was brought on part time, because I was still kind of figuring out what to do with my travel business well, before I came on full time.
And I was just thrilled with what Offsite was doing and how was how it was going to be really impacting the travel industry and changing it in a positive way. And so then I joined on full time, and since then…I guess it's been two and a half years or so…I’ve been building a marketplace of just amazing inspiring venues for groups.
JARED - And in many ways, we're both scratching our own itch here. Before the pandemic, I had a company called Meeting of the Minds where I was running three days summits for entrepreneurs, and I was doing everything we would do for Offsite users and clients now from finding the venue, negotiating with them, make sure the contract was kosher, building the agenda out hour by hour, managing the budget line item by line item, then I was also facilitating, selling the $3,000 tickets to attend Meeting of the Minds, etc. And I actually worked with Kristen and her company a couple times for the venue selection, negotiating and contracting elements of working with few different hotels.
So it's really cool for me that I started Offsite to scratch my own itch in offsite and conference planning, because it was a pain in the ass. And you are building a marketplace with us that alleviates some of the challenges that you've had as a travel agent, doing this sort of work for clients over the last decade of your career. So I think it's really cool that you're bringing that entrepreneurial spirit to the table, that you're also building a marketplace with a certain vision for how it should work for offsite planners like yourself.
We have that in common. So I'm glad you're here. There are a lot of pain points along the way, the time, the energy, the money, all of that is just just a lot of different factors. So I love how we get to attack those different issues and solve them for clients. And so we'd love to hear from you, you know, reflecting back two years ago, two and a half years ago, when we started building the actual marketplace for Offsite.
What did you interpret as the initial strategy for building out that marketplace? And what do you think we did really well, that's allowed us to now surpass 1000 hotels and build out the kind of inventory for our users and for our clients that is getting them these massive discounts is letting them book so quickly. Like what what do you think we did really well in the early days and walk us through some of the early days of building this marketplace?
KRISTIN - I think what we did really well early on was we built the marketplace based on what our clients were requesting and asking for. We were seeing their needs and what their ideal offsite would look like. So whether it was we want to be within 90 minutes and have a cabin like experience in this state or we want to be okay, we want to be in the city but we really want to have a really unique meeting space or there's like I think we did a good job of just listening to okay, this is what you're looking for. We don't necessarily have a partnership with that venue yet, but we can find it for you.
And then so it's we did a lot of just I think listening to what clients were looking for, and then actually building the marketplace based on that. And then as we started to have more and more clients, we use that data to really just continue to build out our most sought after destinations, or our, you know, the different vibes that clients wanted. So we kind of took into consideration, you know, what's, what's the average budget, how about how many people just really went through all those data points to build it out to where now we serve, basically every major market that's ever been asked for, we as we continue to kind of look at our marketplace health and make sure we have enough venues in each destination.
But early on, I think that was one of the the key focuses, at least that I had was okay, we're going to deliver something amazing for this client based on exactly what they want. So we tried to have a marketplace where the there's a solution for every request.
And then kind of leading by, okay, which we do have standards with the types of venues we work with. So we want to make sure that they are, they are just really great to work with. They understand our clients and what they need when they're on site. They're also have a level of either design that's unique, or something that makes them like special, you know, not necessarily like the cookie cutter typical, not that those are bad, but just a more, you know, like things that are really make venue or destination really special. I think that's what we try to bring into. Yeah, our approach when adding new venues to our marketplace.
JARED - So I, I hear that having a curated marketplace was really important for us in the early days versus a much broader marketplace where we were letting any venue in, we were allowing people to make their own profiles at first, which is now as a venue you can apply to be listed on the marketplace. But we've, you know, had a vetting process this whole time, specific to what's on planning and off site would need.
And within the ideal client profile that we have, which is largely like high growth startups working with a chief of staff how to people, executive assistants, you know, people leader type at, you know, remote or hybrid company, like we got really specific on the ICP, we decided to build a curated marketplace versus plugging into some Hilton API, or some Google API for hotel options. And for the first, probably 50 to 100 offsites, everything was a custom search for the most part. And we built our inventory along the way to match that data.
And now we have search data in our platform. And we can have that inform the additional inventory route to the marketplace. But really listening to customers knowing what kind of customer profile we were serving, building a curated marketplace to meet those specific needs. And, you know, building a service business to start kind of influenced that in a positive direction, as we're now building more and more software to scale this up.
I also think, to the curated elements, you and our previous colleague, Jenny did an amazing job of finding a few key boutique hotel groups to partner with and building a relationship with them that we were then able to leverage to build relationships with other hotel groups, other well respected hospitality providers kind of leveraged the the social proof of those initial deals in order to snowball into the sort of supply that we have now.
Can you speak a little more to that and so that, like, how you actually applied the curation element to the marketplace we've built.
KRISTIN - Yeah, those initial hotel group partnerships were really important like with like AutoCamp and like Hoxton Hotels, these are really unique venue, type brands. And we started bringing them business early on too. So that really helped, you know, solidify our partnerships like not only do we want to recommend you, but now we're booking you. And we're having really happy clients that future groups or maybe even asking for these types of properties. So that really helped in solidifying the partnership and also just our leverage with them as well.
So we can confirm that, hey, we are going to get you the best rates. We're going to get great contract terms, and all the specific details because of the Yeah, we were able to partner early on with those types of hotel groups.
JARED - What does this mean for users and for clients nowadays? You know, how, how are we able to save them 20, 30, 40% or more on their room blocks? How are we able to negotiate savings with meeting space with resort fees? Tell us more about how this all works and why.
KRISTIN - Yeah, we actually, yeah, we have like signed listing agreements with these hotels to where we have solidified partnerships, they know that we are going to consistently be promoting them to clients, because we know that they deliver and they do a great job. And we know that clients aren't, so we're going to be consistently sending them proposals and booking them. And in exchange for that client, those hotels can, you know, rely on us for group business.
So in doing so, they agreed to provide like the the best possible rates, they agree to kind of work with some of those contract terms. So and we have booked several groups at some of these hotels. So we have started to see, okay, the different patterns of what we've been able to negotiate for food and beverage minimums and for room rates and for these different things. So it actually makes the, the contracting process faster, as well. So it just it speeds everything up for the clients and for the hotel, just to make that connection. And then also, yeah, finalize the whole agreement.
JARED - Or with the hotel managers, salespeople that I've spoken to, part of the the secret sauce and how all this works, at least as I interpreted is, you know, we're bringing group business to these hotels, almost exclusively during the week, which is have all the inventory. Like if we were trying to get discounts on the weekends and compete with weddings and other personal group travel, it'd be harder to get discounts. Although not impossible. But because it's during the week hotels are very eager to get that business, we're saving them on marketing costs as well, and on sales time, and therefore cost. Because they don't have to pay for these leads. Yeah, we're bringing them like qualified groups.
And then to your point, we're speeding up that proposal contract proposal process, the contracting process, because there's a lot of intent, when a user or client is coming to allstate.com. And making a booking request, like they want to book something immediately. And so that saving the hotel a lot of time and money, and then we're essentially passing all that savings on to the users and to clients.
And then we've also gotten to the point now where we're processing 10s of millions of dollars a year in spend, and that's only going to grow. And so, you know, that gives us economies of scale. And you know, the individual hotels want to secure more of our business, the hotel groups want to secure more of our business across all their properties. And then we do have partnerships now with like Hilton high and Accor. And like at the global level, they want more of our business. So that giving them even more incentive to give us these amazing deals for clients and for users.
So what else, you know, if someone were to try to do this themselves?
Where should they be looking to save with a venue? What contract terms should they be looking closely at? Any anything they should be trying to optimize for? Or avoid entirely?
KRISTIN - I mean, it's true that we've done hundreds of venue contracts. And we've seen these across all different major hotel brands, as well as boutique hotels, even like individual, you know, independent properties. So we've kind of understand, like, here's the over overarching like standard terms, and those are usually around like the nightly rates, cancellation, you know, what's allowed if you if they did need to reschedule or something.
But I think the main things is like, there's like the, the financial elements of the contract, there's the cancellation, and then there's those unexpected things like, oh, say they were to do a renovation or something while you're there, how does that affect your group? You really want to make sure that you're protected? So yeah, I would say there's, I mean, I could get into the specifics of okay, we, you know, make sure to waive that resort fee, or at least get it reduced, make sure to, you know, get discounts on on various elements of the program. But, overall, I think it's just we understand those terms. We've been, you know, we've been through tons and tons of contracts to where we kind of know with every with every contract, we make sure to have them either pre negotiated or we negotiate on the client's behalf.
JARED - What do you think are some of those specific clauses, terms, things to negotiate that you know, even the sophisticated offsite planner may not know what to ask or you may not know to look for?
KRISTIN - hmm, I think around like, let's see around financial, I would say like the attrition clause is really important because groups can, you know, maybe expect a certain number of people, but then if their numbers drop leading up to the program, they could actually be on the hook for a lot of money if that attrition clause isn't negotiated properly, or if those numbers aren't anticipated. So I think that that's really important to look for before signing is really understanding the attrition and trying to negotiate as much as possible to make sure that the group is protected, whether or not those numbers, those numbers change. So I would say that's a big one.
Also around like the force majeure is important. So like, if something happens, you know, like, weather wise, or, you know, if there's just something that would affect the group from being able to go on this program like, that can really be a huge expense for the client, if it's not really negotiated properly, and making sure that both, you know, the, I think the rescheduled terms are really important, making sure that the client knows that they can have that ability to reschedule not just via money, etc. So the financial is obviously really important.
Another thing is even around like exclusivity of the meeting space, sometimes if there's other groups that can be on property at the same time, as your group that could actually cause some issues like whether you're passing with group that it can just lead to an unanticipated kind of stress on site. So that's one thing to maybe talk with the hotel beforehand. That's definitely something that we try to do is make sure ‘Okay, are there any other groups in house making? Sure, there's also no other groups in house that have error in the similar industry? Things like that, that maybe, you know, clients haven't thought of that we definitely do on their behalf?’ Yeah, Wi Fi, is we making sure that yes, all the amenities in the rooms that would work for your guests, making sure you have amenities in the meeting space that fit your needs, like whiteboards, or, you know, TVs?
Or they're going to give you water not like, what about the property amenities? You know, knowing all these things, before you make a purchasing decision is really important. It's why we're building out our profiles, the way that we do say, you can filter our marketplace accordingly, you can see all this information at the property level, all before you send in a booking request. You know, we're, we're trying to make it easy, folks. But give us feedback. Let us know.
JARED - So yeah, I mean, we're coming up on time, but what most excites you about the future of the Offsite marketplace, as you see it. And I asked you, just a couple hours ago in our department leader meeting, but what are what are you most proud of, sort of looking back last two and a half years?
KRISTIN - I'm really excited about I think that we're building something that hasn't yet been built within this travel industry. And I think we're doing it in a very deliberate way. And it's based on what clients want, right. So I think that that is what really sets us apart. And we're going to continue to build it out very diligently, very, like really taking into account all the specific details to make it special. And to deliver something that truly doesn't exist yet. There isn't a marketplace platform. Hopefully that will be this, you know, easy to use this cost savings for clients really stress free, but also delivering on
Yeah, just amazing experiences for groups. So that's what I'm excited about. I think that our team here at Offsite is, you know, we're all just bought into the same vision. We're all super passionate, and we're working hard to just advance it every say, you know, we're constantly advancing our products, so and using client feedback to advance it. And I think the way that's different than what we've seen out there. And then what I'm proud about Offsite, I'm really proud of just how I think our team is just adapting to whatever gets thrown at us.
I feel like we can be extremely adaptable to kind of the the environments around us and just continue to build I think, what is needed? And then I think personally, I will not personally but obviously it's a team effort. But I think one of my main focuses is obviously building out the marketplace. I'm just proud of where it is right now and how we've evolved it to be 1000 plus curated venues. And yeah, really also the fact that it is saves so much for clients, like on average clients save 20% or more on room blocks, I think to have that many venues that are consistently saving clients money is is definitely a win. So yeah, those are a couple of things that come to mind.
JARED - Well, thanks so much for taking some time to chat with me and really by extension you watching this at home, or wherever you choose to work from. So, yeah, if you have any feedback at all, on the marketplace, please email us jared@offsite.com. If you want to add your property to the marketplace, if you're on the hotel side or vendor side, just go to offsite.com and click at the top right to become a vendor.
And if you're a user, or clients or want to search our marketplace, just make a free account at offsite.com at no cost, and no credit card required. You can be searching Airbnb style through all the amazing properties that Kristin has helped curate. So thanks so much, Kristen.
Share this post