The offsite has changed, and so has its conscience
There's a particular flavour of dread that comes with planning a company offsite. Twenty-five colleagues. A spreadsheet of dietary requirements that reads like a chemistry exam. Someone's flight is from Lisbon, someone else is driving from Manchester, and the CFO has just asked, casually, what the carbon footprint of the whole thing will be. Offsites used to be about ropes courses and questionable trust falls. Now they're a measurable line item on a sustainability report — and that's actually a good thing, because it forces the kind of planning that makes them better trips, full stop.
Why offsites have a bigger footprint than you think
A team retreat compresses the most carbon-intensive parts of travel into a few days. You've got flights from multiple origins, ground transfers, hotel rooms running air-con around the clock, catered meals (usually heavy on meat and dairy by default), printed materials, branded swag, and the inevitable third evening where someone hires a coach to take everyone to dinner forty minutes away.
The single biggest contributor is almost always travel — and within travel, it's the flights. A short-haul return per person, multiplied across a team, dwarfs everything else on the agenda. The hotel matters, the food matters, the swag matters, but if you don't get the travel decision right, nothing else you do will move the needle meaningfully.
The good news: this means the levers are clear. Choose a destination most of your team can reach without flying. If they must fly, choose direct routes. Stay longer in one place rather than hopping between cities. And pick a hotel that isn't quietly burning through resources behind the scenes.
Pick the destination like a logistics problem, not a Pinterest board
The romantic instinct is to pick somewhere photogenic and back-fill the practicalities. The sustainable instinct — and, conveniently, the cheaper one — is to start with where your people actually live.
Map your team. If you're 70% London, 20% Berlin, 10% remote across Europe, you have a clear travel-emissions optimum that probably isn't a beach in Bali. A train-accessible venue from your two biggest hubs will shave more carbon than any amount of offsetting after the fact. For globally distributed teams, the calculation is harder, but the principle holds: minimise total person-kilometres travelled, prioritise rail over short-haul flights wherever the route exists, and resist the urge to fly everyone somewhere "neutral" that's actually neutral to nobody.
Two practical questions to ask before you fall in love with a location:
- Can the majority of attendees reach it by train, or by a single direct flight under three hours?
- Once they arrive, can the venue, accommodation and any planned activities all be reached without taxis or coach transfers?
If both answers are yes, you've already cut the trip's footprint dramatically before you've thought about the hotel.
What actually makes a hotel a credible green stay
Hotel sustainability claims are a minefield. A laminated card asking you to reuse your towel is not a climate strategy. When you're vetting a venue for a group booking, look for things that are specific, measurable, and ideally third-party verified.
Certifications that mean something
Genuine eco-certifications go beyond marketing. Look for properties certified under recognised standards such as Green Key, EarthCheck, LEED, or those listed by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. These cover energy, water, waste, procurement and staff training — not just one feel-good metric. Ask the hotel directly which certification they hold and when it was last audited. A real one will answer in a sentence; a vague one will send you a brochure.
Energy and food
Renewable electricity, heat pumps or district heating, on-site solar, and a kitchen that sources locally and seasonally will tell you more than any "eco-resort" branding. For groups, the food question matters disproportionately because you're typically eating most meals on-site. A hotel that can offer a low-carbon menu by default — plant-forward, local, with meat as an option rather than the centrepiece — is doing real work.
The boring stuff that adds up
Refillable toiletries instead of miniatures. Tap water on the table without being asked. Linen changed on request. No single-use plastics in the conference rooms. None of this is glamorous, but at scale across a multi-day group stay, it's the difference between a hotel that takes sustainability seriously and one that prints it on a tote bag.
Designing the agenda so it doesn't undo your venue choice
You can pick the greenest hotel in Europe and then bus everyone an hour each way to a vineyard. The agenda is part of the footprint, and the most thoughtful organisers treat it that way.
- Cluster activities geographically. If the welcome dinner, the workshop venue and the off-site activity are all walking or short-cycling distance from the hotel, you've eliminated a huge chunk of in-destination travel.
- Default to plant-forward catering. Don't ask people to opt in to the vegetarian option; make the standard menu plant-based and let people opt up if they want. The uptake on the default is always higher than you'd expect.
- Skip the swag, or make it useful. Branded water bottles handed out at a hotel that already provides reusable ones is a parody of sustainability. If you must give something, give one good item people will actually keep.
- Make a "no printed agenda" policy. A shared digital schedule is better in every way, including findability when someone forgets what room they're in.
The offset question: necessary, but not the main event
Offsetting has had a rough few years in the press, and not without reason — too many programmes have turned out to be vapour. But the answer isn't to abandon offsetting; it's to be honest about its place in the hierarchy.
The order of operations is: avoid, reduce, then offset. Avoid travel that doesn't need to happen (does the kickoff really need everyone in person, or just the leadership team?). Reduce the footprint of the travel that does happen (rail over flight, direct over connecting, longer stays over multiple short trips). Then, and only then, offset what's genuinely unavoidable — and do it through verified, traceable schemes rather than the cheapest tonnes you can find on a corporate procurement portal.
If your finance team is going to sign off on offsetting, they'll want a paper trail. Verified registries, project-level transparency, and ideally something that doesn't disappear into a PDF nobody ever opens again.
Talking to your team about it without being preachy
Here's a small thing that matters more than most planners realise: the way you communicate the sustainability choices you've made will shape whether your team thinks they're a perk or a compromise.
Don't bury the green credentials in a footnote. Don't lecture, either. The middle path is to mention it the way you'd mention a hotel's gym or rooftop bar — as a feature of the trip, not a sermon. "We chose this venue because it's a fifteen-minute train from the office, the kitchen sources within fifty kilometres, and the building runs on renewable energy" lands very differently from "We have decided as a company to prioritise…"
People generally feel better about trips that have been thought through. That's the actual sell.
Build a template you can reuse
The first sustainable offsite is the hardest. The second is easier, and by the third you have a template. Things worth writing down for next time:
- The travel-emissions baseline of this year's trip, by category, so you can compare next year.
- The vendor list — venues, caterers, transfer companies — that actually delivered on their sustainability claims when tested. And the ones that didn't.
- What the team said in the post-trip survey about the food, the venue, the pace. Sustainable choices that people genuinely enjoyed are the ones to repeat.
- The rough cost-per-head versus the previous year. Sustainable offsites are not automatically more expensive — often the opposite, because you're cutting flights, transfers and waste — and having the numbers makes the next planning conversation faster.
Where IMPT fits in
If you're booking accommodation for a group, IMPT lists 1.7 million hotels across 195 countries, and every booking made on the platform offsets one tonne of CO₂ on-chain — paid by IMPT from its commission, not added to your bill. For an offsite of any size, that turns the hotel line of your travel report into something you can actually point to. Beyond the booking itself, the IMPT shop and card mean the smaller decisions around a trip — the gear, the team gifts that don't end up in landfill, the everyday spending that funds the rest of the year — can sit inside the same climate-positive logic. Useful when the CFO asks again next quarter.