Team Building in Prague Through the Eyes of a Corporate Event Organizer

Team building in Prague has one big advantage and one big trap.

• The advantage: international companies usually have offices and space here, there are plenty of hotels and restaurants, and a team gets here from all over the country and from abroad.
• The trap: downtown is packed with tourists, and what looks like a great backdrop in photos turns into a crush once the event is running.

Prague suits team building, but not everywhere and not for every group. It depends on how many people are coming, where the event takes place, outdoors or indoors, and what the team should take away from it.

Why Prague

All roads lead to Prague rather than Rome. Trains, highways and the airport converge in one city, so a team spread across Europe gets to the event quickly and easily. The metro takes you from one end of Prague to the other in no time.

The second reason is the historic setting. Every visitor wants to see Prague Castle, take a photo with the castle guard at the gate, snap the astronomical clock on Old Town Square. Prague has a magnetic pull, and you will never have to spend long talking colleagues from abroad into a trip here.

The third reason is continuity. In Prague you can stack a morning conference, an afternoon team building session and an evening reception into a single day, and often into a single neighborhood.

What Prague Does Well

Prague is above all a mecca for tourism. Incentive-style corporate programs are a flawless and logical choice for this city.

A whole range of hotels and restaurants has built its business model around corporate events. Občanská plovárna, for instance, is a historic complex in the heart of Prague that today serves as a modern event space on the Vltava.

Public transport gets you to the riverbank downtown without any trouble, but it is better to leave the car at the hotel.

Prague also offers settings that are hard to assemble anywhere else. Historic landmarks, riverside embankments, islands, industrial halls in Holešovice and parks.

Where It Gets Difficult

The tourist center is the weakest spot of team building in Prague. Charles Bridge and Old Town Square look great in a presentation, but you will not set up an archery station there. If you want outdoor activities downtown, your only real option is some form of Treasure Hunt.

Permits and noise are the next weak spot. Outdoor production in public space has its own rules and has to be arranged with city officials well in advance. If you go for a private venue, you will still have to agree with the operator on how late the band can play. Nobody enjoys discussing residents' complaints with the police.

And then there is rent. The closer to the center you want to hold the event, the emptier your wallet gets. Renting halls for indoor activities or an outdoor site for an outdoor program can swallow the kind of sum that would cover an entire corporate event in the Vysočina region, accommodation and catering included. Sometimes it really pays off to step outside the tightest center and put the savings into the program and the food.

Which Team Building or Experience to Choose

You have to balance group size, the setting for the event and the budget.

Do you simply want a program in the historic center at any cost? Treasure Hunt Prague satisfies every participant, whether the occasion is team building, a conference or a training session. Do you want to skip the crowds downtown and still enjoy majestic views? Treasure Hunt Vyšehrad fits that brief, and it sits right next to the congress hotels.

Would you rather enjoy the program in nature than on cobblestones? Stromovka, Letná Gardens, Vítkov, Petřín Gardens, we can place any of our story games in all of those, from Sherlock Holmes Cases through Pirates of the Pacific to Amazing Race. An event in nature and still a short hop from downtown.

Are you planning the event at a hotel? Chocolate Making Day, where you produce your own chocolate pralines, is a hit with everyone. We will also run an escape game in a conference hall for up to 70 people at once. No waiting around for another team to finish its tasks in some escape room, everybody plays at the same time.

An evening Pub Quiz gets a company party going, whether it is an Oktoberfest Party or a nineteen-thirties themed night.

Anything planned well ahead can be planned properly.

Planning a Christmas party in Prague? Chocolate Day, Escape Box, Brain Party, the Oktoberfest Party, and Don Maccarone are all part of our corporate Christmas party programs for groups of 5 to 500. We bring them to a hotel conference room, a private room at a restaurant, or your office, so nobody has to travel out to the edge of the city.

A Plan B for the Weather

Fall weather can surprise any corporate event, and not only here in Prague. We are ready for that. A backup "wet" version of the program is part of every event, and you can always switch to an alternative program on our own TerraHunt game platform.

Plan B rests on three fixed points: a reserved indoor space, a prepared version of the program, and the moment the decision gets made. That moment matters most. When you decide only once it is already raining, it is too late for catering and for the technical crew.

They say fortune favors the prepared. The better you prepare for bad weather, the less it will surprise you.

How to Work with the Budget

The price of a corporate event cannot be read off a price list, because it depends on your preferences and on what we agree. A price list for organizing a corporate event simply cannot be presented like the price list for sausages and salami at the butcher's. The budget can be reliably broken into parts, though, and that is exactly what you need before you go to your finance director.

In the Prague events I prepare, the most commonly underestimated item is the reserve for transport, in both money and time. A program can be shortened and lunch simplified, but humanity does not have teleportation technology yet. So if you are moving hundreds of people from the outskirts to the center, you have to count not only the cost of the vehicles but also the tens of minutes spent in traffic.

• Venue and technology: space rental, sound, lighting, furniture.
• Catering: main meal, coffee breaks, snacks to go, drinks.
• Program and instructors: preparation, equipment, staff at the stations.
• Transport and accommodation: the bus, and a night's stay if the event runs late.
• A reserve of roughly a tenth of the budget for the unexpected.

Safety and Alcohol

An injury at a corporate event is a workplace injury. It sounds like a formality for the records until somebody twists an ankle on the cobblestones. The more adrenaline activities the program contains, the higher the risk of injury. We take the view that activities do not have to be about adrenaline. They have to be interesting and fun. A well-built intellectual activity you have to solve under time pressure can raise your adrenaline more than a parachute jump.

Alcohol has to be settled before the evening party starts. With teams that have tense relationships, limiting hard liquor and sticking to beer and wine works well. If you want it, we will also provide discreet conflict-prevention supervision that defuses a situation before the whole company notices it.

The best prevention, though, is the program itself. The more interesting the things people are doing, the less they drink and the less old disputes come back up.