A company offsite near Cartagena usually turns into one of two things with us: a day out at sea that has everyone back in the city by six, or the whole place to yourselves for a night or two. We're on the southern shore of Tierra Bomba, 25 minutes by boat from Cartagena, facing the open ocean. There's no bridge and no road, which is exactly why it works. Nobody slips out to take a call in the lobby.
Here's how we'd plan it, with the numbers we actually charge.
What a team day costs
A day pass with boat transfers both ways is $40 per person. That gets your group across and into the beach club, and from there you pay for what you eat and drink. If you want your people in a fixed spot rather than scattered, a VIP daybed in front of the pool is $50 and a beach cabaña, quieter and closer to the water, is $30. Sun loungers run from $5 to $30 depending on where they sit.
For food, group lunch menus are $45 per person for parties of 10 or more. That's the sensible route for a team: one menu, one bill, no forty-minute ordering round while the sea sits there unused.
Getting everyone across the water
Our boat leaves Cartagena from the Muelle de la Bodeguita at 10:00, 11:30 and 17:00. It comes back from us at 16:00 and 17:30. For a work day, the 10:00 out and the 16:00 back is the version that gives you a full day without anyone checking their watch at lunch.
Book the boat with the reservation. Capacity is limited, and if you turn up unreserved with fifteen colleagues and there's no space, the next boat is a long wait in the sun. If the tide is high or the sea is rough we use the dock in the village instead, about a mile away, and you ride pillion on a motorbike taxi from there. Most groups enjoy that part more than the boat.
Groups of 13 and up book with us directly
From 13 people, you can't just book online. Contact us, we'll take advance payment, and we'll agree a set menu with you before you arrive. It isn't bureaucracy for its own sake: the kitchen is on an island, everything arrives by boat, and knowing what forty people are eating on Thursday is the difference between a good lunch and a long one.
We take up to 250 people during the day. Over 70 and we ask you to privatise, which means the place is yours and nobody else is booked in.
Staying the night, and taking the whole place
We have 11 rooms and can sleep up to 30 people on the property. Full private hire is available: Blue Apple yours alone, which for a leadership offsite is the cleanest version of all of this. Full board, with all food and soft drinks, is $90 per person per night. There's a $20 per night resort fee, which pays for the fact that we're not plugged into city utilities and generate a good deal of what we use ourselves.
On tax: foreign residents pay no tax on hotel accommodation here. An 8% food tax applies to all food and drink and isn't refundable. For Colombian residents, IVA is already included in what you see.
One honest note before you plan the arrival: check-in is from 3pm and check-out is by 11am, but unless there's a private event on, your team can use the beach club before check-in and until 5:30pm on the day they leave. Nobody has to sit on a suitcase.
Can you actually work here
Yes, within reason. The wifi is excellent about 95% of the time, good enough for video calls, and it does go down occasionally. We can set you up with a table in the shade near power sockets. What we don't have is a conference room with a projector and a stack of flip charts, so if your offsite depends on a four-hour slide deck, this is the wrong island. If it depends on people talking to each other away from their inboxes, it's the right one.
Worth knowing: there's no phone signal on the island. Everything runs on wifi and WhatsApp, ours included. That's also how you should reach us to plan any of this, and we reply to reservations enquiries between 9am and 9pm.
What people do between lunch and the boat
We'd rather give a team two good options than ten they'll never use.
Our Back of House Sustainability Tour is the one we'd push for a company group. You see what actually goes into the place, waste, water, energy, the unglamorous parts, and the fee is a donation to our impact fund. We're B Corp certified and the cure for greenwashing is letting people look at the plumbing.
A private dance class is the other reliable one: salsa, champeta, which is the local Afro-Colombian style, or zumba. Two left feet welcome. It does more for a team in an hour than most trust exercises manage in a day.
If your group would rather be in the water, we're a PADI Dive Resort with a coral house reef about an eight-minute swim out, and we run everything from a first discovery dive upward. Our cooking class teaches ceviche, for two, wine included, and works better as a couples thing than a forty-person activity.
What we're not
We're not a conference hotel and we don't pretend to be. We don't do all-inclusive bar, this isn't Cancún. You can't bring your own food, and you can't bring your own alcohol unless you've privatised the whole place, in which case we charge corkage.
We're also not wheelchair accessible, and we're sorry about it. Getting here is a boat ride and then a 200 metre sandy track, and the hotel wasn't built with accessibility in mind. If someone on your team needs step-free access, tell us before you book and we'll be straight with you about what's possible.
Our kitchen is run by Executive Chef Pedro Mosqueda, and we care more about lunch than most places with a pool care about lunch. If your team is coming this far, that's rather the point.
Send us a WhatsApp with your dates, headcount and whether you want the day or the night version, and we'll come back with a plan. See you on the boat.