Kyoto · Nine-day management offsite

Nine days in Kyoto

Oct 2024 – May 2025

Sixty people from the senior team, living across thirteen countries, in Kyoto for nine days. Almost every one of them needed a Japan visa, applied for from wherever they were based — each residency situation with its own set of documents and its own embassy.

I flew to Japan in October, seven months before the event, to walk the whole trip the way a participant would later live it — and to find where it might not hold while there was still time to do something about it. Four top hotels, each looked at against the same questions: the service, where it sits relative to everything on the program, the conference space, the restaurants and how much range the kitchens actually had. This was a group that needed a five-star standard across the whole experience, not just the hotel. Four Seasons Kyoto was the one that held up on every count.

From there the hotel side was mine end to end — contract, payments, every line of communication. Alongside it: flights for all sixty, most of them routed through connections, and the Tokyo–Kyoto leg planned separately as its own piece of the trip.

• 60 senior participants
• 7 months, inspection to event
• 4 hotels inspected

I didn’t go to look at rooms. I went to walk the trip the way sixty people would live it, and find what could go wrong before they did.

The offsite ran without a hitch: sixty people into Japan and home again, nothing gone wrong in transit, and not one question at a border.