Where to Stay for a Kalahari Convention or Team Offsite

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Kalahari's Pocono convention centre runs 215,000 square feet across 33 meeting spaces, with a 38,000 square foot ballroom. It brings conferences, trade shows, training weeks and corporate events into the middle of the Pocono Mountains, largely midweek.

If you are coming for one of them with colleagues — or bringing a team somewhere for a few days that is not an office — here is the case for a house instead of a block of rooms.

One booking, one invoice

The practical argument first, because for anyone expensing this it is the whole argument.

Six people in hotel rooms is six reservations, six folios and six sets of incidentals to reconcile. The same six in a house is one booking, one invoice, one line in the expense report.

If you have ever tried to close out a team trip where everyone booked separately and three people upgraded, you already know why this matters more than it should.

What a team actually needs that a hotel does not give you

Somewhere to talk that is not a lobby or a bedroom. The useful part of an offsite is usually the conversation after the sessions end. That conversation does not happen well in a hotel bar and it definitely does not happen in somebody's room.

A table. A real one, with everyone round it. The great room and the kitchen table both seat the group.

A kitchen. Breakfast before a 9am session without queuing, and the option of not eating conference food twice a day.

Quiet. The property is surrounded by forest with no adjoining rooms and no corridor. If you have calls to take between sessions, that is a meaningful difference.

WiFi that is not a conference centre at capacity.

Fourteen minutes from the convention centre

Slanted Stone Chalet is in Pocono Pines, fourteen minutes from Kalahari. Three bedrooms plus a bunk room, three and a half baths, sleeping eight, across 2,900 square feet.

Other useful distances if the schedule has gaps:

• Mount Airy Casino, 19 minutes — the obvious place for a group dinner or a late one
• Camelback Mountain, 20 minutes — skiing in winter, mountain coaster and waterpark in summer
• Tobyhanna State Park, 15 minutes — worth an hour if anyone wants air between sessions
• Pocono Raceway, 11 minutes

Midweek is the easy time to book

Weekends here go first, particularly in season. Midweek is genuinely more available and priced lower, which happens to be when most conventions and offsites run.

If you are planning a Tuesday-to-Thursday, you are asking for the nights we most want to fill. That is a better negotiating position than most people realise.

Being straight about what this is not

It is a house, not a business hotel.

No conference room, no AV, no printer. If you need a room with a projector and forty chairs, book the venue.

Somebody drives. Fourteen minutes each way, and after a long dinner that needs planning.

No daily housekeeping. The place is cleaned before you arrive and after you leave, not in between.

No front desk at 2am. We are reachable, but we are not a concierge.

If those matter, the resort is the right answer and we would say so. If what you actually want is somewhere for six or eight people to be together, work when they need to and stop when they are done, a house does that far better than a corridor of rooms.

Booking a midweek stay

Minimum stay is two nights most of the year. For corporate bookings, an invoice can be issued for the full stay — just ask when you book.

Book your stay direct and use code INSIDER10 for 10% off, or get in touch at hello@slantedstone.com and we will sort the details.