Thinking about planning your company retreat in-house? Here's an honest comparison of DIY vs. working with an agency - costs, time, and what most people get wrong.
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Every HR manager who's planned a company retreat has faced the same question at some point: do we handle this ourselves, or do we bring in someone to do it for us?
On paper, doing it yourself looks cheaper. You cut out the agency fee, you deal directly with suppliers, and you stay in control of every decision. It sounds logical.
In practice, it's more complicated than that. This article breaks down the real costs and trade-offs on both sides - so you can make the decision that actually makes sense for your situation.
When people say they'll plan a retreat themselves, they usually picture the fun parts: browsing venues, choosing activities, picking restaurants. What they underestimate is everything else.
A realistic DIY retreat involves:
Research. Finding venues that fit your group size, dates, and budget. Shortlisting options, requesting availability, comparing what's included. For a mid-size group with specific requirements, this alone can take 10-15 hours.
Supplier coordination. Venues, catering, activity providers, transport companies, hotels - each with their own contracts, invoices, and points of contact. For a two-day retreat with four or five suppliers, you're managing a small project.
Negotiation. Unless you work with a particular supplier regularly, you're negotiating without leverage. Agencies that place groups repeatedly with the same suppliers get better rates, better service, and priority availability.
Logistics. Building the schedule, communicating it to participants, coordinating arrival times, managing dietary requirements, preparing contingency plans if something changes on the day.
On-the-day management. Someone needs to be present and available to handle issues. If that person is also supposed to be participating in the retreat, they'll do neither job well.
None of this is impossible. But it's a significant amount of work, and it sits on top of your actual job.
The common assumption is that agencies are expensive. The reality is more nuanced.
A good agency charges a fee - typically a percentage of the total budget or a fixed project fee - in exchange for handling the sourcing, coordination, and execution. What that fee buys you is not just convenience. It's access to supplier relationships, local knowledge, and operational experience that takes years to build.
Here's what that translates to in practice:
Better supplier rates. Agencies that work regularly with venues, caterers, and activity providers negotiate volume rates that individuals can't access. In many cases, the savings on supplier costs partially or fully offset the agency fee.
Time saved. If you value your time at even a modest hourly rate, the 30-50 hours a well-organised retreat can take to plan has a real cost. That time has an opportunity cost whether or not it appears on a budget spreadsheet.
Risk reduction. When something goes wrong - and on any event of meaningful size, something always does - an agency has the relationships and experience to fix it quickly. A first-time planner dealing with a supplier problem on the day of the event has very few options.
Quality of output. Agencies that specialise in corporate retreats have done this many times. They know which venues have unreliable catering, which activity providers are good on paper but disappointing in person, and which combinations of experience and venue create the best atmosphere for a given type of group.
Here's a framework for thinking about it:
DIY makes sense when
An agency makes sense when:
The honest truth is that most corporate retreats fall into the second category. The groups that try to DIY a 40-person, two-day retreat in a destination they don't know well usually end up spending more time than expected, paying more than they anticipated, and delivering something that falls short of what they imagined.
The biggest misconception is treating the agency fee as pure cost. A better way to think about it: what would it cost your organisation if the person managing this retreat spent 40 hours on it instead of their actual work? What's the cost of a retreat that lands flat because a key supplier underdelivered and nobody had the leverage to fix it?
A well-run retreat has a real return - on team cohesion, on motivation, on the sense that the company invests in its people. A retreat that feels disorganised or disappointing has the opposite effect. The agency fee is partly insurance against that outcome.
The term all-inclusive gets used loosely in the corporate events world. Some packages genuinely include everything - venue, accommodation, all meals, activities, transport, and a dedicated coordinator. Others include the venue and not much else, with everything added at cost.
Before comparing prices, make sure you're comparing the same thing. A seemingly expensive all-inclusive package from a specialist agency often works out cheaper than a DIY approach once you add up all the individual supplier costs - and it comes with someone responsible for making the whole thing work.
When evaluating proposals, ask: what exactly is included, what isn't, and who is responsible on the day if something goes wrong?
There's no universal answer, but there is an honest one: for most companies planning a retreat of any real ambition, working with a specialist agency saves money, saves time, and produces a better result.
If you're unsure which approach fits your situation, we're happy to talk it through. Sometimes the right answer genuinely is to do it yourself - and we'll tell you that if it is.
