A half-million-dollar corporate retreat to Honduras turned into a week-long disaster involving illness, wild animals, armed guards, and employees stranded on a remote island.
Tech media company Plex flew its 120 employees to a Honduran resort in 2017 for what was billed as a Survivor-style getaway. They called it “Plexcon.” The first harbinger of trouble was an email that arrived before the group departed, informing them that the hotel manager and chef had both quit within days of each other. Things went sharply downhill from there.
CEO Keith Valory, 54, had flown out a day early, intending to channel his inner Jeff Probst and welcome his staff off the buses like a game show host. Instead, he spent the arrival morning flat on his back. “I got E. coli, which is maybe the worst thing you could get, possibly, ever,” Valory told The Washington Post this week.
“Just as people were arriving on the buses, I was like, ‘Uh oh.’ I lost 8 or 10 pounds. They had a doctor come to me, which apparently is pretty standard. They nailed an IV bag to the bedpost.”
With the CEO incapacitated, chief product officer and co-founder Scott Olechowski, 52, stepped in to run proceedings—beginning with a forced eating challenge in which one employee had to consume a dead tarantula. Shawn Eldridge, 55, Plex’s head of business development and content, volunteered. “I just grabbed it and did it. Pretty horrible, not going to lie. Those hairs,” he said.
The company had hired a Navy SEAL to lead the team-building exercises. Valory, from his sickbed, could hear it all unfolding outside. “As I’m in my room dying, I could hear them out there doing all their drills and yelling. So I’m in here thinking, ‘This is terrible, but it sounds terrible out there, too.’”
Olechowski acknowledged that “this is not a super fit group in general,” and the 100-degree heat and humidity quickly overwhelmed the assembled tech workers. “The ex-Navy SEAL is like, ‘We can tone it down, no problem.’ We get up there, and it’s hot and humid, and people are passing out,” Olechowski said. “I don’t think he’d ever seen quite such an unfit group.”
The SEAL relocated the group to a nearby golf course for a guerrilla warfare simulation. Senior product manager Greta Schlender, 41, hit the ground on command—and landed directly on a hill of fire ants. “I’m just like, ‘Oh, my God, what is happening?’” she recalled. “I was wearing shorts, OK? I jumped up, and I had hives and bumps from the bites. It was horrifying, and it was so, so itchy. The medical area didn’t have any regular antihistamine. So they’re like, ‘Oh, we can shoot some into your butt cheek.’ That was a first for me.”
An alligator was also spotted on the golf course. Back at the hotel, uncooked meat was being served. “We were razzing, ‘At least this isn’t a tarantula,’” Eldridge said.
Sean Hoff, 42, founder of Moniker Partners, the independent retreat agency that planned the trip, was running himself ragged attempting damage control—the showers, water, and electricity kept cutting out. “I was running around delivering water bottles to the rooms,” he said. “I wasn’t hydrating, and so each afternoon I would start having these heart palpitations. They had to call an ambulance and hook me up to an ECG machine. They were like, ‘Sir, you need to slow down. You are stressing your body to the maximum.’”
Meanwhile, senior software engineer Rick Phillips, 53, was trying to sleep when he heard a crash in his room. He ignored it until morning. “I got up and went over to get in the shower, and there was a porcupine,” he said. “It must have climbed a tree and fallen through the ceiling.”
The group’s day trip to a nearby island provided little relief. Several staff members were left stranded there after their planes failed to return. Meanwhile, Schlender’s antihistamines had worn off. “They’re looking for a doctor on this island to hook me up with another shot. I am writhing,” she recalled. A woman in a hot-pink shirt appeared. “She put a line into a vein on the top of my hand so that she could administer it. I’m like, ‘I hope she’s a doctor.’”
When the stranded staff finally made it back to the resort, their colleagues greeted them with a standing ovation. “We got back to rounds of applause from our colleagues for surviving,” Schlender said.
Hoff, who organized the whole thing, has no illusions about how it went. “It was just such a calamity.”
Schlender, despite the fire ants, the mystery injection, and the island ordeal, calls it “one of the most fun trips ever.”
