A Porcupine in the Shower, a CEO on a Drip. Welcome to the $500k Corporate Retreat From Hell.

This story is nine years old. It went viral again last month. And the reason why tells you everything about where Australian businesses are right now.

In 2017, US tech company Plex decided to do something big for its 120 fully remote employees. A week in Honduras. Survivor-themed. Half a million dollars. What happened next has been described, generously, as “a shit storm of sorts.”

The first sign of trouble arrived before anyone landed: an email informed the group that the hotel manager and the chef had both quit within days of each other. It didn’t get better from there.

CEO Keith Valory had arrived early to welcome his staff off the buses. He was already flat on his back in his hotel bathroom. He’d been told repeatedly not to eat the salad. He ate the salad. He contracted E. coli, dropped nearly 10 pounds, and spent the week on an IV drip.

With the CEO bedridden, the co-founder stepped in to kick things off. The opening challenge involved employees lifting platters to reveal what they had to eat. One platter contained a dead tarantula. Shawn Eldridge, head of business development, lifted the cover, grabbed it, and ate it. “Pretty horrible, not going to lie. Those hairs,” he said.

A former Navy SEAL had been hired to run military-style drills on the beach. In 100-degree heat. The co-founder later acknowledged this was “not a super fit group in general.” People passed out. One employee landed on a fire ant hill and needed a shot to the backside. A porcupine broke through a ceiling into a software engineer’s shower. The power went out. Then the water. Staff were plagued by sand fleas at dinner and fumigated daily.

And then a group of employees got stranded on a remote island overnight because two planes couldn’t take off in the dark. There was no runway lighting.

So why is everyone talking about it again?

The Wall Street Journal ran a deep feature on Plexcon in early April 2026, interviewing the survivors nearly a decade on. It immediately went viral.

The timing makes sense. The current consensus among HR leaders is that mandating specific days in the office is less effective than designing intentional in-person experiences, including quarterly off-sites, team-building weeks, and collaborative work sessions, that give people a genuine reason to come together.

In other words, the corporate retreat is back. Bigger than ever. And every founder with a remote or hybrid team is now planning one, budgeting for one, or wondering if they should.

The Plex story landed at exactly the right moment to make everyone stop and ask: are we sure about this?

What Australian businesses can actually learn from it

Here’s the thing. Despite the E. coli, the tarantula, the porcupine, the stranded employees and the entire week of logistics chaos, many Plex employees look back on the Honduras trip with surprising fondness. The shared adversity created hundreds of inside jokes and bonds that outlasted the sunburns.

That’s not an argument for booking somewhere with no running water. But it is a reminder that the point of a retreat isn’t perfection. It’s connection.

If you’re running a remote or hybrid team in Australia right now, here’s what the Plex story actually teaches you:

• Plan properly or don’t bother. The warning signs were there before anyone boarded a plane. The hotel manager quit. The chef quit. Nobody pulled the plug. Due diligence on your venue and supplier isn’t optional when you’re responsible for 120 people.
• Know your duty of care. Australian employers have obligations to employees that don’t stop at the office door. If you’re sending your team somewhere, you are responsible for their health and safety while they’re there, not just physical safety but also psychosocial hazards. That means medical access, appropriate activities, and a plan for when things go wrong.
• Match the activity to the people. Military drills in extreme heat for a group of remote tech workers who sit at desks all day is not team building. It’s a workers’ compensation claim waiting to happen. Know your team. Design accordingly.
• Have a contingency. Not a theoretical one. An actual one. What happens if someone gets sick? What happens if they get stranded? What happens if the venue falls apart?

Corporate retreats, done well, are genuinely valuable. They build the kind of culture you cannot create over Zoom. But done badly, they are expensive, stressful, and potentially a legal problem.

We help Australian businesses figure out what they actually owe their people, and how to look after them well. If you’re planning a big team event and want to make sure you’ve covered your obligations, talk to us first.

Unlike Plex’s CEO, we’ll tell you to skip the salad.