Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Soumen Bhowmick
A slow traveller, road trip enthusiast, Soumen travels to understand how places breathe beyond maps and itineraries. A road tripper at heart, he finds meaning in country roads, small conversations, changing landscapes, and the quiet stories that unfold between destinations. That same instinct now shapes how he designs journeys for organisations, MICE, brand drives, product launches and CSR initiatives built the same way: around people, place and what's real, not what's scripted.
Planning a corporate retreat around responsible travel takes a change in order rather than a longer to-do list. Find out what is already going on in the destination first, and one or two parts of the retreat become things that could not happen anywhere else. That order decides who the team meets, who gets paid, and what you leave out of the plan.
Nobody is being asked to spend less here. Companies will keep booking luxury hotels, good vehicles and professional services. People who have flown a long way to work and talk for three days expect exactly that. A destination can be a venue, where the company arrives with a finished plan, uses the rooms, runs its sessions and leaves. Or the destination can change what the retreat contains, through the people who live there and the work they do.
It begins before the first room is booked, the first activity is chosen or the first invitation goes out.
By the time a group lands anywhere, the trip is the result of dozens of decisions somebody else made. A planner chose the route. The company approved the dates. The property was picked on budget and on what the leadership team expects. The programme was built around business objectives. Everybody the team will meet was picked long before the team knew what the trip held. So handing employees a list of things to remember in the name of responsible travel misses where the real power sits.
A company holds an unusual amount of that power. It can bring fifty or five hundred people into one town at the same time. It decides how they spend their days and where most of the money goes. It can decide whether the evening comes from a standard event supplier or from musicians who live in the district the team is visiting. It can decide whether a local craft appears as decoration in a hotel lobby, or whether the team meets the people who still make it. Every one of those decisions is settled long before anybody boards a flight.
Responsible travel does not work as a layer added at the end. Once the programme is written and the destination has been reduced to rooms, views and a list of bookable activities, there is almost nothing left to change. The better question comes earlier. Before asking what the team will do in a place, ask what is already going on there.
Everything that could not happen anywhere else. Somebody who has spent thirty years doing one thing with their hands. A person who changed something in their own village and can say what it cost them. A river or a hillside that decided how everyone around it builds, eats and travels.
Set those against the parts of a retreat that work the same everywhere. A leadership session works in any room with a door. A strategy day happens in one city as easily as another. A trainer runs the same team exercise in Coorg as in Jaipur without changing a word of it. Those sessions are useful, and none of them needed a destination.
If the whole programme would work just as well in another state, the destination was picked as a venue and nothing more. Choosing a destination the other way round is what we have called Destination Thinking. It starts with what is already in a place rather than what the place looks like. A place is not an empty box waiting for a corporate programme. People live there. Knowledge has built up over generations.
A hotel cannot supply any of that. A retreat might include a conversation with somebody whose work changed their own village. It might be an hour with a weaver whose skill came down through her family. It might put a team in front of people trying to save a forest or keep a practice alive. None of it belongs in a programme just because the programme needs something local. Each of those encounters already matters to somebody in that place. A retreat does not create the meaning. It creates a chance to meet it.
By being studied before the programme exists, not after.
A programme built the usual way is finished first. Then somebody notices a gap on the second afternoon and hunts for something local to fill it. Whatever they find becomes a break between two work sessions. A programme built the other way starts with the destination. The planner finds out what is happening in the area and asks whether any of it fits what the retreat is for. Then the schedule gets built around the answer.
Perhaps somebody who spent ten years saving a forest starts a conversation about decisions that take that long to pay off. Perhaps a weaver working at her loom says more about patience than any trainer could stage. Perhaps a village shows what people can do together with none of the money a large company has.
Not every encounter has to become a management lesson. Turning one into a lesson is another way of using a place for the company's own ends. Sometimes it is enough to let people meet somebody and leave it there. A retreat already asks everybody to spend three days talking about their own work. An hour with a stranger who does something else is a break from it. Study the destination before you start on the sessions, the timings and the running order.
The paid ones. The adventure afternoon, the team-building activity, the ticketed attraction everybody does.
The strongest move in planning a retreat is not adding anything. It is taking one of those and asking whether the hours could be spent differently.
Take an afternoon booked for a paid adventure activity. Tickets bought, gear hired, instructors paid, everybody back by six. The same afternoon, the same hours and roughly the same cost could go to a school an hour away, interacting with students, the teachers, their needs, and their hardships. Nothing was added to the programme. And yet the outcome of one afternoon gets changed.
That swap also does the job companies spend a great deal of money trying to do. Team challenges built to force collaboration. Workshops structured to produce trust. Trainers who build games to make colleagues talk to each other differently. Plenty of it is useful and none of it is wasted.
But an afternoon spent on something that matters to somebody else builds the same trust those exercises aim at. Nobody had to design it. Nobody has to explain afterwards why that afternoon mattered. Everybody was there.
In the first weeks, before the programme is written.
Somebody asks a local school, an organisation, a self-help group, or an NGO, what help it needs. The reply comes back, and it is usually not what anybody in the company expected. Only then comes the question of whether a visiting group can help, and where in the trip that would sit.
The reply has to arrive before the programme exists, because a programme that is already full has nowhere to put it. Ask after the venue is booked, and the answer goes into whatever gap is left, and it doesn't remain the same.
We call such programmes Spreading Smiles. Because it is the simplest way to express what it is. A visit built on an answer somebody gave you is a different thing. The other version is an hour at a school with a bag of stationery and a group photo on the steps for LinkedIn. A need raised in week one can change the shape of a trip. A need raised a week before the retreat starts can only fill a gap.
Pick the ones whose work matters whether or not a group turns up.
Money is not the only thing a group brings into a place. Attention counts too. When a hundred people travel together, whoever they meet becomes part of what they remember. The questions they ask and the stories they take home last far longer than the trip.
The best encounters start with work that matters whether or not anybody visits. An artist whose practice belongs to that district. A musician who has kept a form alive for decades with few chances to play outside local occasions. An artisan whose skill survives because people still buy the work. Somebody trying to protect a valley that shaped how everyone around it lives. None of them is waiting for a corporate group. Their work already means something, and a retreat only creates a chance to listen to it.
Finding them is easier than it sounds. Every district has somebody doing something hard and interesting. Most of them have never been on anybody's itinerary. The villages where a community decided something and then lived with it are one place to start, and there are others in every state.
A cultural experience turns into a performance the moment the company sets the terms instead of the person doing the work.
An encounter happens when somebody agrees to give a group an hour. They were asked properly, told what it was for, and paid for their time. They talk about their work. People ask questions. And it does not end when the conversation does, because people carry it home and repeat it.
A performance happens when somebody is booked to be interesting for forty people on a schedule. They are expected to be warm, to explain themselves, to be photographed and to finish on time so the bus can leave. Nobody repeats that one afterwards. The same person can be in either situation. Asking where something actually happens and who is handed the money is the quickest way to tell which one you have booked.
Where money changes hands, pay for the knowledge and the hours. Not as a gesture. Where no money changes hands, ask whether the visit puts a load on anybody. Having local people in a programme is easy. Arranging it so it works for them too is the part that takes effort.
Gifts and the evening programme are the two lines that move most easily, and neither costs more.
Every retreat already has a budget. It pays for rooms, transport, food, entertainment, activities, gifts and a long list of smaller things. None of it means every rupee has to change hands somewhere else. A fixed percentage would ignore what is actually there in different places. Some destinations have strong local networks and others have very few options.
The useful question is whether some of the money already being spent can go to somebody in the destination instead. Corporate gifts are the clearest example. Companies usually buy identical objects in advance and hand them out during the trip. A different version gives each person an amount or coupons to spend with artisans where the retreat is being held. They meet whoever made the thing, learn a bit about it and pick for themselves. What they carry home came out of a real meeting rather than a catalogue.
Entertainment and guides work the same way. A musician can be hired because the music belongs to that part of the country, not because the programme needs an authentic evening. A guide can explain a valley because they grew up in it, which an agency representative cannot. Hiring locally proves nothing on its own. How well it works depends on the research behind it. But a fee paid to somebody who already lives in the destination does more than the same money paid to somebody who flies in and out.
Keep a short list of things you will not put in the retreat, and hold to it even when the programme looks thin.
The pressure to break that list arrives late. Somebody notices the trip needs something that shows it was responsible, and goes hunting for a village visit or an artisan session to supply it. That is when a real relationship turns into decoration. A village gets asked to receive visitors who know nothing about it. A school becomes a stop on an itinerary. An artisan demonstrates a skill for a group with no interest in their work.
So four things stay off the programme. A community should not be visited because the programme needs an emotional moment. Employees should not be taken to look at hard lives so they come back grateful. Money should not be handed over because the company wants to be seen giving. Nobody should be asked to provide authenticity as a form of entertainment.
One more mistake deserves its own line. A company should not finish an entire retreat and then start looking for something local to attach to it. By then the destination has been given a walk-on part, and its people are being asked to decorate a plan built somewhere else. Sometimes the right answer is that a visit should not happen at all, and leaving it out is the more responsible choice.
One question sorts most of them, and it is short.
Would this still be worth doing if nobody photographed it, posted about it or mentioned it in the company's retreat report?
If the answer is yes, it belongs in the programme. If the answer takes some thinking about, it was going in for the picture.
The test is blunt and it catches most of what goes wrong. A community visit that only exists for the post fails it immediately. An hour with somebody doing interesting work passes it easily. You would want that hour whether or not anybody knew you had it.
Comfort is the objection that stops most companies before they start, and it is a fair one. People expect a room they can sleep in and a bathroom that works. Leadership needs a hall big enough for everybody and a projector that switches on. Companies have real concerns about safety, timing and logistics. A large team often cannot use small or scattered properties at all, and a multi-vehicle convoy is frequently the only workable option.
So responsible travel should not become a test of how much discomfort a company will hand its people. A five-star hotel is not automatically the wrong choice. A small property is not automatically proof of anything. In many places only one property can hold the group. That makes the hotel a limit rather than a choice, and a poor thing to judge a retreat by. A company can book the most expensive property in the district and still let the destination shape everything around the stay.
None of this makes a retreat blameless and it is not meant to. Large groups use resources and travel puts pressure on places. Responsible travel is easier to believe when it says so, instead of pretending one label or one activity wipes that out. What a company can do is take responsibility for the decisions it controls, and stop treating comfort and care as opposites.
Not from a badge on the programme or a line in the report afterwards. The evidence sits in the planning.
Did anybody look at the place before the programme was written? Did anything about the place change the programme? Were local people included because their work was worth an hour, or because they were easy to book? If the company gave something, did anybody ask what was needed, or was it decided in advance?
One more question is the sharpest of them. Could the same retreat have happened somewhere else? If every meeting, meal, activity and evening could move to another state unchanged, the destination was never part of the plan. The company carried its programme from one place to another. That can still make a good offsite, and it does raise the question of why the company went there.
None of these questions produces a score. Different places offer different things, and companies need different things. What can be shown is the process. A planner who can say why each outside person was involved, and what the retreat tried to build with the destination, has done the work. Nobody can show whether the trip made a lasting difference, so nobody should claim it.
Because a programme written first leaves the destination nothing to do but host it.
A company travels because it wants something from the journey. People thinking differently. Working relationships that hold up under pressure. Talks that never happen in the office. Those are good reasons to organise a retreat.
The trip also brings a company into a place that was there long before anybody arrived and stays after everyone leaves. People work there. Communities have their own problems. Somebody is keeping a practice or a landscape going. The real question is not whether a company can justify taking its team somewhere comfortable. It is whether the people designing the trip looked at the destination closely enough to let it change the plan.
That takes more than reusable bottles and a checklist. It takes attention before anybody arrives. It takes better questions while the trip is being planned. And it takes accepting that the best part of a journey may be something the company did not bring. People may still remember the hotel and the celebrations. They may also remember an artist they met. A valley they finally understood. A morning that mattered because it changed something outside their own group.
Planning in that order, destination first and programme second, is what sits behind care-based travel. Care starts before the trip does. Moving through a place creates relationships, and relationships bring responsibilities.
Do not choose a place for your corporate retreat and then design a programme inside it. Understand the place first, and let what is already there change what your retreat becomes.
The destination was studied before the programme was designed, instead of after. The practical difference is that something in the retreat could only have happened in that place. It has nothing to do with giving up comfort or booking a smaller property.
Before the programme, which is earlier than most companies begin. Once the sessions, activities and evenings are fixed, anything local can only go into a gap that was designed without it. This is not extra time. It is the same time spent in a different order.
Ask people who live there rather than working from an agency list. Every district has somebody keeping a craft alive, protecting a landscape, or running a school where that is hard. The test is whether their work would matter if no group ever visited.
Look at who set the terms. A genuine one is arranged by asking, pays somebody the going rate for their knowledge and their hours, and ends when the conversation ends. A staged one is booked to a schedule, expects warmth on cue and finishes when the bus needs to leave.
What it actually needs and when it needs it. The answer is often not what a company would have guessed, and might be textbooks, a water connection or repairs before the rains. Asking first is what separates a contribution from a handover arranged for photographs.
It can be slotted in, and it will show. A need raised in the first weeks can change the shape of a trip, while one raised after the venue is booked only fills whatever gap is left. The order is what people at the receiving end notice first.
Usually not in money, because most of it is about where existing spending goes rather than spending more. The real extra cost is planning time, since none of it sits on a rate card and it takes calls, waiting and second calls.
The people who run it. What they name is usually not what a company would have chosen, which is the reason to ask rather than assume. Their answer also has to arrive early enough to influence the programme rather than fill a gap in it.
Usually better. A group of eight can sit in somebody's workshop for an hour, which forty cannot. Small teams also have fewer scheduling constraints, so the programme can be built around when somebody is free rather than the other way round.
The process. Was the destination studied before the programme was built? Were people included for their work or for how they would look? Did a contribution answer a real request? Could anything in the retreat only have happened there? Impact is not on that list, because nobody can measure it in a quarter.