About our trips:

Our trips include an exciting itinerary of excursions highlighting the culture and beauty of the region with time allotted for seminars, discussion and team building exercises. The combination of events and specific focus is designed to fit your needs.

The focus of your voyage can be incentive, culinary education, wine education, recipe development, training (with your own company agenda)….Each trip is customized to suit your goals. Each trip provides ample opportunity for creating advertising and marketing packages. A full time photographer can accompany you to enhance your advertising plan.

All teambuilding exercises and events are planned and facilitated for you. During exercises, participants learn about themselves, convey that knowledge and learn how to work together as a group.

The focus is on learning through experience – Participants engage in fun activities such as scouring the Provencal markets for specific items, team cooking lessons and meal preparation, blind wine tasting and identification, map reading, hiking and direction exercises to name a few. Team members role play and debate as well.

There are twice daily debriefing sessions so participants can integrate what they’ve learned.
The purpose of these activities is for the participants to learn how to work as a group and to discover effective tools for leadership, cooperation and communication.

Sample itinerary:

Monday arrival in Provence 3pm.
Pick up at Avignon TGV or Marseille Airport.

Monday—hotel check in, walking tour of village, icebreaker and introductory team exercises -- follow up with kitchen utensil exercises or portmanteau exercises to identify personal goals, strengths, weaknesses and skills. Each person prepares a list of work related tasks that highlight each other person’s stated strength (to be used later in an exercise.)

Evening concludes with a Welcome dinner.


Tuesday—revolving breakfast presentations (in groups of 2 or 3)—topic relating to organization is put on breakfast table for the presenting group—each person presents one side of the debate for 3-5 minutes (e.g. our corporate hiring/promotion policy is? Our new product line is? Our company hours of operation are? Our policy on “?” is ? )

Morning sightseeing—participants choose teams and path for ‘hike’ to reach Medieval village summit. Discussion of leadership and direction.

Lunch—Cooking demonstration in Professional kitchen. Lunch follows, including brainstorming session for developing ideas for training and learning needs both related and unrelated to career goals and corporate goals. Brainstorming incentive ideas for reaching corporate goals.

Private Wine Tasting event—with wine tasting game. After tasting each wine, participants each try to convey the wine they have tasted so that the person not tasting the wine can identify what wine is being discussed. Each right guess gets a point for the giver and receiver of the clue.

Debriefing.

Dinner –Out in Local Restaurant


Wednesday—revolving breakfast presentations (in groups of 2 or 3)

Market Tour. Each team of 2 is given money and assigned a group of items to find and purchases to make at the market, with specific rules for language use. The first and best purchases each receive point.

Lunch in private room at hotel --with meeting facilities for corporate presentations

Evening group cooking event. Each team is responsible for preparing a dish or course—using the utensils they and their teammates picked in the kitchen utensil exercise.


Thursday—revolving breakfast presentations (in groups of 2 or 3)

Map exercises, and team search.—St Remy and Van Gogh’s walk from Sanatorium to town, along with tour of Sanatorium. Develop map and identify history of his stay.

Debriefing and lunch in St Remy.

Thursday afternoon—given market baskets of ingredients with assignment to plan a French menu and prepare a French meal for dinner. Develop their own teams and assign tasks.

followed by dinner.


Friday morning-revolving breakfast presentation (in groups of 2 or 3)
Friday, transfer to train for Paris ½ day or further daily activities in Provence.

Friday night—either transfer to Airport in evening from Provence, for early morning flight home or transfer to Paris on Friday morning for ½ day of sightseeing and Farewell dinner.