Plex took 120 remote employees to Honduras in 2017 for a weeklong, Survivor-style corporate retreat that the Wall Street Journal says cost $500,000, and the thing started unraveling before people even arrived.
The hotel’s General Manager resigned three weeks before the event. He peaced out, “I wish you the best with your retreat.” The hotel’s head chef quit a mere 3 days later.
If that wasn’t a sign things were headed south quickly, the road to the resort was unpaved and there were towers with guards and machine guns alone the way.
Everyone was warned not to eat salad, because of the water used to wash the lettuce. Plex’s CEO didn’t listen. He wanted vegetables. And he got E.Coli on the very first day of the retreat.
- They brought in a Navy Seal to run drills with employees. He was a Navy Seal, not a recreational group leader and he had no ever seen “such an unfit group.” They ran drills in 100-degree heat. This was a software company.
- The property’s new chef had never served a 100-person group before. All the meat was served raw or undercooked.
- The group went to a remote island, but the 8-person prop plane couldn’t make enough trips to bring everyone back before dark, so a group of 20 got stranded there.
Senior executives at the tech company Plex were eager to treat their 120 fully remote staffers to a weeklong corporate getaway in a tropical paradise.
What followed was a comedy of errors. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/YdNFJUsmzd
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 7, 2026
This wasn’t the tropical team-building adventure that had been pitched to everyone.
Instead, there were challenge stunts like eating a dead tarantula. A porcupine fell through the ceiling. An employee landed on a fire-ant hill and broke out in hives. The event was an HR deposition with a beach view.
A more interesting point is that the WSJ says employees later remembered it as a bonding experience and company legend, which is probably true in the narrow sense that shared adversity does create cohesion. But it is also the kind of story that makes you wonder how many separate judgment failures had to stack up before anyone thought, maybe don’t run Survivor on hard mode in Honduras for your engineering staff.
I’ve always personally disliked corporate events, picnics and trust exercises. But I guess whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and you bond with the people you survived it with. That seems to be the takeaway from the reporting on this event that ran around the same time as the original Fyre Festival.
The warning signs were everywhere – from loss of key leadership at the property, to the remote site with weak infrastructure and visible security issues, to the brutal heat. With enough failure points one issue easily cascades.
But when you get one executive with a fantasty for the event, that’s going to force people into it, especially when no one is in a position to question them or speak truth to power – they’re not ‘on the team’.
One takeaway is don’t run insane offsites badly while another is to turn lemons into lemonade and build that into your culture. As Matt Levine puts it,
One takeaway — which investment bankers, and Navy SEALs, know — is that people bond through adversity, so torturing and poisoning your employees might actually be a better team-building activity than, you know, “fun.” Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit might be the right analysis of corporate retreats. “There are probably hundreds of little inside jokes that came from that retreat,” says the chief product officer, apparently fondly.
“Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit” is from Virgil’s Aeneid: “perhaps one day it will be pleasing to remember even these things.” It’s the idea that struggles will become fond memories in the future. Those of us who have kept loyalty with American Airlines and Marriott know this well, though we’re still waiting for the payoff.
Umm… That’s hazing, not a retreat.
Spell check is not your enemy.
Michael Scott as manager?
This happened NINE years ago and yet it is popping up today?
I have always said no to any corporate events, even Xmas parties. Work is work, outside of work is my life, and it does not include coworkers or managers.
Learning to say no is essential at work and in life.
Tragic it wasn’t Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon or some other software company that actually deserves such treatment.
“ The event was an HR deposition with a beach view.”
If this joke wasn’t written by AI I’ll eat a tarantula
This is ridiculous, Roatan in the bay Islands is not a remote island, is a very busy, very touristic island, that gets high profile guests from all over the world, it has plenty of fancy, Big, and very capable resorts and hotels. Wherever icky place these employees were taken to and had bad experience at was truly due to poor choices and planing from the plex management.
@Kal – it was something a friend said to me
@Denver Refuge — Sorry, Oracle just laid off 30,000 people and gave the person who did it a $30 million bonus. So… yeah, send that executive to this bootcamp for a ‘retreat.’
I used to have a place on Roatan, sold it a few years ago because development was ruining the island. To say it is remote is laughable. My guess is that they were on Barbareta, which is a separate island at the far eastern end of Roatan. It is privately owned by Kelsy Warren, a Texas billionaire whose family is one of the powerhouses of the Bay Islands. He does not allow uninvited visitors to the island and has guards out 24/7 to keep poachers and tourists away. He has hosted corporate events in the past, so that fits.
While most companies that employ remote workers, often technology (because only a laptop and wifi are needed) do not go anywhere this extreme they definitely feel the need to have retarded and annoying events. Like virtual happy hour, virtual Christmas Parties and virtual sporting competitions. The idea being they want to extort the feeling of in person control. No thanks. I have no desire to drink alone while online with people I’ve never met in person. Call me 1985.
This may be a growth area, Since AI is more efficient and less workers are needed there is more time & budget to spend at corporate offsites.
First off, if this was mandatory or if not attending impacted your performance evaluation, I’d be ringing up an employment lawyer PRONTO. This has NOTHING to do with anyone’s job duties, performance and work output. Dumb garbage like this is dreamed up by executives who think everyone is as crazy as they are, and/or are living under the delusion that their employees are their “friends.” My work is exactly that – work. I don’t show up to socialize, grab drinks/lunch/dinner or gab about “American Idol.” I’m there to do one thing: WORK. I have plenty of friends, and while I genuinely care about the people I work with, I am not their “friend.”
And I thought survivor for techies was a Foosball table with a broken forward that can not spin.
It would take all of them to fix it. Then is would fail in beta testing, the repair would be over budget and completed after they left.
I don’t even attend company parties. After my shift it’s all for me.
This article is a good definition of the word “Bonvoyed.”
@Ken A — Zing!