theoffsiteco Omdömen 2

When I first met with Mat and his team, I was looking forward to working with them. They shared big promises for our company retreat. We provided a clear set of objectives for our retreat, along with lists of the activities we’d like, employee names and locations and an introductory schedule for each day events. Below is the events that unfolded during our relationship.

Our team engaged with Mat on June 14th. It took them 4 weeks to get us two sets of venue options. Once we selected a venue, the terms of the contract had clearly not been reviewed by Offsite nor were they what we had discussed. I was told by Offsite it would be better for me to just manage the questions and changes direct with the venue. How odd, isn’t it your job as our planning company to help manage this process? But we were losing time, so I took this on.

We sent our final contract for Offsite to sign on Aug 7th.

During our venue review and the weeks that have passed up to this point, I receive no other planning from Offsite (no venue options for our dinners, no master planning document, no budget tracking, no team building ideas, nothing) even though I am ensured they are being worked on. I reached out to a number of local dinner venue options, got pricing and share with Offsite to further look into. The extent of their support was to just forward over menus or contracts with no real explanation, negotiation or review. I was told once again it would be better for me to continue the conversations with restaurants and planners directly.

At this point I ask our account manager to speak with the Offsite owner Mat about how long this was taking, the lack of any other planning coming through and my constant need to have to manage relationships myself and always be checking in with their team to get an update on progress. Mat apologized and ensured his team would be move involved. A week later our account manager was let go from Offsite and Mat agreed to take on our account. I spent the next few conversations with Mat bringing him up to speed on where we are in the planning process, because he nor anyone else on their team was in the loop.

Middle of August our hotel reaches out they still do not have a signed contract and Mat finally sends it over. On Sept 3, I get an email from the hotel no payments have been made, Mat’s credit card is denied, the venue planner cannot reach him and we are at risk of losing our entire booking.

We decided to end our relationship with Offsite 2mo. and 3 weeks from the time of our initial engagement. At the end of our relationship I still had no master schedule, budget documents or any other planning from their team and our hotel had not been paid even though we we’re told they had been on many occasions and Offsite had our hotel deposit money for weeks now.

When we ended our relationship with Mat, to show his unprofessionalism his response was to immediately send our hotel venue and dinner venues emails telling them to cancel all contracts. To further show his teams lack of involvement in the planning, two of the dinner venue contracts he reached out to try and cancel were not even under Offsite (as they should have been per our agreement) because I had been told by Offsite to manage those on my own.

On Sept 4th, we gave wire transfer instructions to Mat’s team to get our hotel deposit back. Mat spent 3 weeks running us around in circles telling us he was too busy to return our money and we did not receive hotel deposit funds back until Sept 30th. He also refused to refund us our second planning deposit payment for work their team clearly never completed.

Thankfully after the end of our relationship, we hired a new planner who helped us turn what ended up being a 100K retreat into an amazing success. In less than one month time they helped us execute on more than Mat’s team in the 2.5 months of our relationship.

I highly caution anyone considering working with this company.

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