Don’t Let Your Corporate Retreat Become a Horror Story: 3 Takeaways from the 2017 Plex Retreat

The corporate retreat is by now a well-known strategy for improving your team’s performance, but not every corporate retreat is successful, and with improper planning, they can even turn into a disaster. The horror of a company trip gone horribly awry has recently been explored in Hollywood both by January’s Send Help and by Corporate Retreat earlier this month. In a different genre and format, the second season of comedy reality series Jury Duty also just wrapped up this month, orchestrating a staged corporate retreat laced with high drama and over-the-top crises. All these stories are ultimately invented, but not all corporate retreat horror stories are fictional.

You’ll find few better examples of this than PlexCon 2017, as described in a recent article from the Wall Street Journal. The article describes, in horrifying detail, the streaming company Plex’s corporate retreat of nearly ten years ago, through direct quotes from the people who were there to experience it. These interviews put together a picture of an event that, while not quite as bloody as the events of Corporate Retreat, could make the latest season of Jury Duty seem tame.

What Happened at Plex's Corporate Retreat?

The corporate retreat in question, PlexCon 2017, was intended to be a fun-filled team building retreat by the beaches of Honduras. According to the accounts in the article, Plex’s CEO, Keith Valory, was a big fan of the famous reality TV show, Survivor, and his love for the show inspired his retreat theme. Employees would be split into teams and compete with each other Survivor-style, with Valory filling the role of Jeff Probst, the show’s iconic host.

However, Valory would not get the chance to play this role as he had hoped to, because on the same day he was supposed to introduce the theme for the retreat, he became incredibly sick with E. coli, forcing him to pass the responsibility on to another executive. This was a rough enough start to the event, but it was only the beginning.

In the days to follow, PlexCon attendees would face much more grueling challenges than expected, live with uncooperative water and electricity, and some even got stranded overnight on a smaller island due to transportation issues. Plex’s corporate retreat was also plagued by too-close encounters with nature—one man had a porcupine fall through the roof into his shower while he slept, another woman accidentally landed on a hill of fire ants during an outdoor activity, and during what was supposed to be a nice dinner by the beach, the group was bitten by sandfleas, which the resort had reportedly been fumigating “every day” to deal with.

Sean Hoff, founder of the corporate retreat planning agency responsible for PlexCon 2017, may have put it best, saying, “It was just such a calamity.”

How to Prevent Your Corporate Retreat from Becoming PlexCon 2017

Obviously, it would be hard for anybody to see all of this coming. You couldn’t reasonably expect anyone at Plex to predict that quite so many things could go wrong all in one single week. However, there are some lessons we can learn from the retreatgoers’ accounts—lessons that Plex has no doubt already learned—to avoid accidentally creating another PlexCon 2017.

We can’t go over every single misstep in just one blog, so here are our top 3 key takeaways from Plex’s corporate retreat disaster, to inform your future retreat planning endeavors.

1. Plan Activities with Your Participants in Mind

Plex’s retreat may have been inspired by Survivor, but the attendees at PlexCon 2017 were not reality TV castaways—just ordinary people with desk jobs. Yet upon arrival at their retreat destination, employees quickly entered into an eating challenge, where for at least one attendee, a dead tarantula was on the menu. Later activities had participants under intense physical strain in 100-degree heat. Valory said, “One of our biggest mistakes was hiring a Navy SEAL to pump the team up.” Even on a toned-down regimen, the combination of the physical activity and the heat was enough for some to drop out and others to start passing out.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to push your team out of their comfort zones. However, it’s important to know your team’s limits, and not push them too far too fast—nobody’s going to learn any valuable lessons while they’re passed out from heat exhaustion.

It’s easy enough to guess that most people will be put off by the idea of dead-spider-eating, but understanding your team’s boundaries isn’t always so simple. Rather than taking a gamble, ask directly for input from everyone who will be at the retreat before locking in any activities. You can even send out an online survey and allow them to fill it out anonymously, to encourage full transparency about what lines should not be crossed.

2. Choose a Venue That Is Attentive & Communicative

While many of the problems that arose during Plex’s retreat were difficult to predict, they did have a clear warning sign in the weeks leading up to the event, when the resort hotel’s general manager emailed to say that they would be “departing,” followed by a similar email from the hotel’s head chef a few days later. Hoff said, “I knew something was off,” but the retreat proceeded all the same.

When you’re planning a corporate retreat, the venue should be a source of clarity and stability, leaning on their local expertise to help you plan your retreat for the environment you’ll be staying in. By contrast, the hotel where PlexCon 2017 occurred seemed to be more of a source of confusion.

According to retreat attendees, both electricity and water would frequently stop working, making it difficult to get comfortable even when relaxing in one’s room. The property, as previously mentioned, had to fumigate daily to battle a problem with sand fleas. Issues with the hotel extended to the kitchen, where not only were retreatgoers presented with “100 cupcakes with the wrong company logo,” but Hoff felt the need to instruct attendees to cut meat servings in half, as it was “coming out uncooked.”

You don’t need your retreat venue to create more messes for you to clean up. You need a corporate retreat center that will communicate openly with you, hear out your concerns, and answer your questions.

3. Streamline Your Experience

Though the resort that hosted Plex’s corporate retreat was arguably missing a cook in a literal sense, it is possible that some of the chaos of PlexCon 2017 was a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Between Valory’s Survivor dreams, Hoff’s independent retreat agency, and the resort, Plex’s retreat was already dependent on several separate entities.

In addition, running a retreat with a variety of activities often means recruiting other travel businesses to manage these activities—though it’s an unusual example, the Navy SEAL hired by PlexCon’s organizers does illustrate this point. This just leads to more potential confusion if not handled properly.

One way to address this is to look for all-in-one providers. The best corporate retreat centers offer not only a space for your activities, but also lodging, food, transportation, and even planning support. The less you have to divide the task of managing your retreat, the easier it is to know what’s going on at any given time.

Bonus Takeaway: Attitude Is Everything

Though Plex’s corporate retreat in 2017 was defined by one catastrophe after another, the fact is that it very easily could have been worse. And one of the key reasons why, in spite of everything, PlexCon was able to squeak by, is because of the indomitable spirit of the team at Plex.

Based on the accounts given in the Wall Street Journal article, the retreat attendees were able to maintain light spirits, shrugging off calamity with humor and adapting to unexpected situations on the fly.

No matter how meticulously you plan your corporate retreat, you are likely to face unexpected obstacles. But if Plex’s corporate retreat was able to persist, a few slip-ups here and there don’t have to ruin the vibe for your event. The key is to keep a positive outlook, and an infectious enthusiasm—modeling this for your team can help them to mirror this attitude, leading to a more positive environment for growth no matter what problems you face.

Take Your Next Corporate Retreat at Vajra Jahra

Whether you’re looking to run your employees through tough challenges with the intensity of Jeff Probst, or you’re just hoping to give your team a chance to relax and strengthen their bonds, Vajra Jahra Retreat Center is the perfect place to plan your next corporate retreat.

We make it our mission to reduce the burden of retreat planning by offering full coordinative support. We’ll not only help you build out a retreat itinerary customized for your group, but help coordinate transportation, booking, and more. We can’t promise zero surprises, but we can promise that we won’t leave you to fend for yourself (or make 100 cupcakes with the wrong logo).

Ready to build a customized retreat in the heart of Costa Rica? Need a venue that will help you manage everything from start to finish? Look no further than Vajra Jahra.

Sources

• Gamerman, Ellen. “Inside a Corporate Retreat That Went Very Badly Wrong.” The Wall Street Journal, 6 Apr. 2026, www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/corporate-retreat-gone-wrong-07754741.