Elevate Your Guest Experience: Inspiration from BoomPop's Cancun Retreat
Planning
Elevating Guest Experience: Tips from BoomPop's Cancún Retreat
BoomPop Team · 8/13/2025Get inspired to create offsite experiences that really wow with an inside look at one of our recent luxury corporate retreats.
The perfect venue, a good caterer, engaging activities—making the right selections for these core elements of your company retreat is important. But to truly elevate your event, thoughtful experience design is your ticket to a gathering that leaves a lasting impression. When you begin your planning process with a clear North Star, you can build a cohesive story across your entire offsite experience, bringing every element together for a more meaningful impact. Experience design transforms logistics into stories, creating real, memorable moments—and it doesn’t need to significantly add to your budget.
So, what does this look like in real life? Well, the BoomPop team recently traveled to Cancún for a companywide offsite, where we explored the theme of Life in Color—a celebration of how our business is both human-centric and AI-powered. Our event planning team brought this theme to life through a thoughtfully curated itinerary that made every day feel immersive, engaging, and connected. Here’s a look behind the scenes to get you dreaming up your next team retreat!
Designing an Emotional Arc That Resonates
Experience design is a tool for crafting events that are cohesive, purposeful, and emotionally resonant. In our post on The 7 Keys to Experience Design, we explored how events that follow an emotional arc leave a more lasting impression.
Rather than treating your event as a sequence of standalone activities, when you design the experience around a cohesive narrative structure, it’s easy to create an emotional arc for your guests. Each layer helped our team bond, reflect, and return energized. Now let’s take a look at the details of each day as our event experience unfolded.
Night One: Encouraging Curiosity & Creativity
The opening night was designed to feel inviting, informal, and full of small surprises, encouraging curiosity and sparking connection right from the start. From drinks served in custom-branded coconuts to a thoughtfully curated menu, every element was carefully considered.
At each dinner place setting, guests found a small glass bottle with a message revealing their “Unicorn Pen Pal:” a fun, lighthearted prompt to meet someone new and connect over the next few days. (This also connected deeply into the BoomPop culture by highlighting an internal tradition we celebrate each week as a team.)
Nearby, we set up a DIY Mexican paper flower station for a hands-on activity that got creative juices flowing. Guests could fold and craft their own colorful flower to be used in the final night’s decor, creating a natural conversational moment and getting everyone involved in crafting the event experience (key for a company whose mission is all about bringing people together through events!)
Night Two: Creating Space for Deeper Connection
After a full day of activities, night two was all about creating connection, building off of the momentum and excitement of the day as we met new colleagues and reconnected with others. That evening, the pace slowed, and the format shifted to make space for deeper reflection and more personal interaction.
We intentionally grouped guests into smaller dinner parties of six to eight, giving them more space for more relaxed and authentic conversations. Different departments were represented at each table. This shift in scale helped quieter voices emerge and allowed for meaningful connections to form.
Day Three: Aligning Around Brand & Purpose
Day three shifted the focus from personal reflection to shared purpose and company alignment, designed to connect individual experience with collective vision.
We started with a brand presentation anchored in our offsite theme: Human-Centric, AI-Powered. The session was broken into small group discussions exploring two prompts around the theme. To frame the conversation, we walked through a visual narrative showing how work has evolved across time. It helped contextualize the team’s place in this moment of transformation and reinforced that our goal is to use technology to elevate human creativity and empathy, not replace it.
This session closed with a confetti balloon pop moment, carefully orchestrated to remind us of our purpose and mark a moment of visual and experiential celebration as a team. (Plus, it offered an epic moment for our onsite photographer and video team to capture!) Guests used cocktail swords to pop balloons filled with colorful confetti while music played in the background. It was loud, joyful, and over in seconds—but it highlighted a core pillar of experience design: these moments are ephemeral, and that’s what makes them matter.
Night Three: Closing with Celebration & Meaning
Our final night brought everything together: celebration, recognition, and symbolic callbacks to earlier experiences. As the team walked down from the retreat to the beach, they were greeted with a gorgeous ocean sunset, a postcard-worthy view, and a custom BoomPop LED sign hanging from a beach cabana.
The paper flowers crafted by our team appeared throughout the space, connecting the opening night event activity to our closing celebration, for natural continuity.
At each table, beautifully designed, BoomPop branded postcards dotted every vibrant, colorful place setting, surrounded by fresh flowers arranged by our team. During dinner, guests were asked to write a note to their Unicorn Pen Pal they received earlier in the week.
The prompt encouraged reflection: share something you appreciated or a moment you shared. These postcards were collected and mailed after the retreat, adding a lasting emotional touch and creating a moment after the event that would remind each guest of our time together and the relationships we built.
We opened the night with a surprise mariachi band performance, which turned into a conga line that led to a gorgeous team photo on the beach right during golden hour. It was high-energy, spontaneous, and cheerful—the perfect contrast to the more reflective tone of the prior day. (Pro tip: hire a photographer familiar with your event space and a drone on hand to capture your whole team’s energy in one epic shot.)
After dinner, we hosted an internal awards ceremony to recognize team members. Once the last award was presented, we cued the music once again, this time celebrated with sparklers for each guest. The space erupted with color, sound, and applause as the evening shifted, leading to a s’mores bar, fire pit and casual team gathering on the beach.
To end the night, guests headed to the dance floor for a surprise DJ set led by a team member and a co-founder, followed by our well-beloved BoomPop karaoke. It was celebratory, a little sentimental, and the perfect way to close out an emotionally rich experience.
Design the Experience, Not Just the Agenda
You don’t need a huge budget or elaborate production to put together an offsite your team will remember. What matters most is intention. From paper flowers to postcards, BoomPop’s team used experience design to elevate simple activations layered with thought and symbolism to create an experience that resonated, all while staying on-budget.
Ready to design an offsite that feels as good as it looks? Let us help you plan something unforgettable.
Take a Scroll through our Cancun Offsite
Still want to see more? So do we, to be honest! Enjoy!
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