I’ve watched a few event organisers lose the plot over Queenstown offsites, and it’s almost never about the agenda or the venue. It’s the moving-people-around bit. Somebody lands late, the dinner is twenty minutes out of town on a dark road, the CEO wants to pop out for a client coffee in Arrowtown at 2pm, and suddenly whoever organised it is on the phone to three different taxi numbers while the keynote is happening without them.
So, a few thoughts on doing it better.
Arrivals are messier than you expect
You’d think everyone flies into Queenstown Airport around the same time. They don’t. One lot comes the night before because they found cheaper flights, the board chair arrives on the first morning flight, and at least one person misses a connection somewhere and turns up at 9pm wanting to know where their hotel is.
What I’d do is keep a scrappy spreadsheet from the moment invitations go out, with flight numbers and hotels in it, and update it every time someone changes plans (they will). For a big group you can bundle people onto shared transfers by roughly when they land. For clients or senior guests I’d send a private car, mostly because a driver holding a name board looks a lot better than your most important guest standing in the taxi line in the cold.
Ask whoever does your airport runs if they watch flights. Some companies do this as a matter of course, which saves a lot of awkward calls when a plane is held up.
Write the days down, with addresses
Queenstown offsites are spread out. Hotel in town, sessions at a conference room, dinner at a winery in Gibbston, maybe a gondola trip or a site visit out at Jacks Point. Central Queenstown you can walk. Arrowtown or Gibbston you cannot, at least not in work shoes after a long dinner.
Once the whole thing is written out day by day with times and actual street addresses, you’ll spot the gaps pretty quickly. Usually it’s the evenings that catch people out.
By the hour, or one trip at a time?
My own rule of thumb is pretty lazy. If a day has more than two or three stops, I stop booking legs and just keep a car and driver for the day, or by the hour. Meetings never finish on time anyway, and it is nice not to care. A single dinner run, or the trip back to the airport, I’d book on its own. You’ll probably land on a mix of both.
People aren’t just a headcount
This gets forgotten. The person giving the keynote might want the car to themselves so they can mutter through their slides. Directors take calls between sessions and don’t love doing it in a crowded van. Plenty of women who travel alone for work would rather have a female driver, and a few Queenstown operators will arrange one if you mention it when booking. And if anyone uses a walking frame or is hauling camera kit or display stands, that decides the vehicle for you.
Weather, dark roads and that last morning
The weather down there does what it likes. Some of the best dinner venues are also a fair way out, on roads with plenty of bends, so I pad every evening by more than feels necessary. The final morning is where it really matters. Flights home are the one thing you can’t move, so send people to the airport in waves that line up with their flights, not as one big group at 8am because it looked tidy on the spreadsheet.
One transport contact beats five
It’s tempting to save a bit by mixing taxis, a shuttle and a couple of operators. I wouldn’t. When the plan changes at short notice, and it will, having one company that holds the full schedule is worth paying for.
When I’m weighing up a provider I look for airport transfers, hourly and daily hire, and the ability to handle one executive or a whole group. As an example, the corporate travel services from QT Chauffeurs & Rentals include airport pickups with flight monitoring, hourly and full-day hire, conference and event transport, client and VIP transfers, and a female chauffeur if you request one. Their cars range from a Mercedes-Benz EQC and BMW X5 to a Cadillac CTS, a Camry and a Prius.
Before you sign off on the plan
Have you got every flight in the sheet? Does each day have times and addresses? Have you decided which days are hourly hire and which are single trips? Have special requests been passed on? Is there slack around flights and the out-of-town dinners? And is there one person on your side who talks to the transport people, so they’re not fielding calls from twelve attendees?
If the answer to all of that is yes, the week will feel easy for the people attending, which is really the whole point. And if you’d rather hand the lot over, a luxury chauffeur service in Queenstown can take the schedule off your hands and keep things moving while you get on with running the event.
