Company Trip 2026 — Sa Pa

Every year NEXTOUR closes the office for a few days and goes somewhere together. In 2026 it was Sa Pa — and it turned out to be the trip people still talk about.

There is something particular about travelling with the people you work beside every day. In the office everyone has a role: the person who handles the Chinese files, the one who knows the Schengen rules by heart, the one who always picks up the phone first. On a bus climbing into the mountains at six in the morning, none of that applies. You are just people, sharing snacks and arguing about music.

The mountains do something to a team

Sa Pa in the mist is a good leveller. Nobody looks composed after an hour of walking uphill in the cold. The senior consultants were as out of breath as the newest hires, and the newest hires discovered that the people they had been slightly nervous of were, in fact, quite funny.

The evenings were the part that mattered. Long dinners, too much food, stories about the strangest visa cases anyone had handled. People who had exchanged maybe twenty words in six months ended up talking until midnight.

What came back with us

Trips like this are easy to dismiss as a perk. They are not. Visa work is stressful — deadlines that cannot move, clients who are anxious, files that fail for reasons nobody controls. The thing that gets a team through that is not process. It is knowing the person at the next desk well enough to ask for help without hesitating.

Since Sa Pa, the office is louder. Files move between desks more easily. People cover for each other without being asked. That is worth more than the cost of a few nights in the mountains.

We will go somewhere else next year. Nobody has agreed on where yet, and the argument is already half the fun.