How to choose a location for a remote team offsite

A great remote-team offsite can fall apart before it starts if half the team spends a full day getting there. When everyone flies from a different city, the location decision is really a logistics decision.

Optimize for the longest trip, not the average

If most of your team is on the East Coast and two people are out West, picking an East Coast city looks efficient on a spreadsheet — until those two teammates burn a travel day each way. A fairer approach is to minimize the worst trip on the team, so nobody’s offsite is mostly airports.

Favor cities with nonstop flights

A “central” city with poor air service can be harder to reach than a slightly farther one with a major hub. Look for a destination most of the team can fly to nonstop. Big connecting hubs often beat geographically central small airports, because a single layover can add more time than a few hundred extra miles.

Weigh the boring stuff

Once you’ve got two or three fair, well-connected options, compare:

• Flight cost from your team’s main cities.
• Hotel and meeting-space availability for your dates.
• How easy it is to get from the airport to where you’re staying.

The cheapest flights and the shortest trips rarely point at the same city — pick the balance that fits your budget and your team.

Let the team see the math

People accept a longer trip when it’s clearly fair and they had a say. Share the shortlist, show the travel times, and let the team weigh in.

MidRally does exactly this for a group: collect everyone’s home metro, surface the cities that are fair for the whole team to reach, and put it to a vote — without collecting anyone’s home address. For a quick two-person sanity check, the meet-halfway pages show the fair midpoint between any two cities.