How to Choose a Retreat Venue

Knowing how to choose a retreat venue is mostly a matter of knowing what to ask, and the questions that matter are rarely the ones the enquiry form invites.

Photographs tell you about the light. They tell you nothing about whether your group can sit in one room together, whether somebody else will be walking past the window on Wednesday, or what happens to your money if you have to cancel in March.

Here are nine questions worth asking every venue, including this one. Several of them are uncomfortable to ask out loud, so it helps to have them written down in advance.

1. How many people can have a room to themselves?

Not how many it sleeps. Those are different numbers and the gap between them is where disappointment lives.

A villa advertised as sleeping twelve usually means six rooms with two beds in each. For a holiday that is fine. For a retreat it means the person doing the hardest work of their year has a roommate and nowhere to be alone at four in the afternoon.

Ask for the single-occupancy figure. Then ask what a room of one's own actually contains, because a "private room" is sometimes a single bed in a converted box room.

2. How many fit in the main space, with mats down?

Your sleeping capacity and your gathering capacity are not the same, and the second one is your real ceiling if your programme has any moment where everyone is in one circle.

Ask for the number with mats or cushions down rather than chairs out. They differ by a lot.

3. Is the practice space exclusively ours for the whole booking?

Some venues book their main room separately from their beds. You can arrive having paid for twenty people and discover a yoga class on Thursday morning.

Ask whether the space is yours for the entire stay, including the hours you are not using it. Setting a room up on Sunday and leaving it set up is worth more than people expect.

4. What does exclusive use actually mean here?

It is a phrase with a wide range. At some places it means the whole property. At others it means the building you sleep in, while the grounds, the pool and the paths are shared with whoever else is staying.

Ask directly: on our dates, is there anybody else on this land who is not with us?

At ASHA the answer depends on your size. From twelve rooms the entire campus is yours with nobody else on it. Between twelve and eighteen people there is a shared option where your rooms and your practice space are exclusively yours and a few residential guests may be walking the land at a distance.

The full guide to hosting a retreat in Tuscany goes into which suits what.

5. Is the kitchen included, and can we use it?

Three things hide here.

Whether the kitchen is part of what you are paying for or a separate charge. Whether it is a domestic kitchen or a professional one, which matters once you are cooking for twenty. And whether you are allowed in it at all, or whether catering must go through the venue.

If you are bringing your own chef, ask that last one before anything else. A surprising number of venues will not allow it, and they tend not to mention it until late.

6. Is cancellation tiered, or all or nothing?

This is the question that separates venues who intend to be fair from venues who do not, and almost nobody asks it while they are excited.

All-or-nothing terms put every ounce of risk on you. If your numbers collapse in February for a June retreat, a venue with tiered terms loses something and so do you, which is how a shared risk is supposed to work. A venue that keeps the lot has no incentive to help you reschedule.

Ask for the tiers in writing before you pay anything.

7. Do our teaching team sleep free?

If you are bringing an assistant, a co-facilitator, a musician or a bodyworker, they need beds, and those beds either come out of your margin or they do not.

Many venues scale this with group size. At ASHA it is one free bed from ten guests, two from twenty and three from forty. Ask early, because it changes your pricing.

8. What happens if the weather turns?

The most overlooked question, and the one that ruins the most retreats.

Plenty of beautiful venues are beautiful because a lot of the programme happens outdoors. Marquees, terraces, open-sided studios. All wonderful in July, all a problem in a storm.

Ask what the wet-weather plan is, how many people can be indoors at once, and whether the indoor space is heated. If the honest answer is that the capacity drops, you want to know that now rather than on the Tuesday.

We say this plainly about our own shoulder season: in May and October the tents and the open-sided marquee can both be taken out by weather, which is why the maximum numbers drop and why those weeks cost less. That is a gamble worth taking for some groups and not for others, and it is covered in the best time of year for a retreat in Italy.

9. How do people actually get here?

Your participants will ask, and if the answer is complicated some of them will quietly not book.

Get the nearest station, the two most practical airports, the transfer arrangement and the realistic door-to-door time, then put all of it on your own sales page. Do not leave it to the venue's website.

One question for yourself

After all of those, there is a last one that no venue can answer.

Does the place suit the work you are going to do in it?

A space that is gorgeous and slightly formal will quietly ask your participants to behave well, which is the opposite of what some programmes need. Somewhere rougher and more alive gives people permission to be a mess. Neither is better. They are different instruments, and you should know which one you are playing.

The only reliable way to find out is to go. Most venues will host you for a night or two, and a visit tells you in an hour what a brochure cannot tell you in a month.

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If you are weighing somewhere in Tuscany, come and see it. Tell Kathrin your dates, your numbers and how you want people to sleep, at events@asha.global, and a written quote usually comes back within two days. The rooms, the spaces and the land are here, and if you would rather experience the place as a participant first, a BreathCamp is the simplest way to do it.