Team building

How to Turn a Fam Trip into a Gamified Experience

November 14, 2025

By Gemma Cirera, Events Director at elmeetingpoint

In the world of MICE events, Fam Trips typically follow a familiar script: guided tours, impeccable coffee breaks, and flawless presentations. Useful, yes. Surprising, not always.

But what if a 5-star hotel became a living game? That's exactly what we did at the Grand Hyatt Barcelona, when we were asked to organize a Fam Trip for 40 industry professionals. Their request was crystal clear:

> "We don't want a tour. We want an experience."

And that's when a hotel stops being just a space… and becomes a stage. We decided to make it happen through play.

The Challenge: Positioning the Hotel as the MICE Destination of the Future

In a premium context, where attendees have seen dozens of hotels, the challenge isn't to impress: it's to make them feel. How do you generate engagement in a space where everything is already perfect? How do you invite reflection on the future of the industry… within their own present?

The answer: gamification, applied creativity, and a transversal narrative.

The Concept: "The Future of MICE"

The hotel proposed the theme, and at elmeetingpoint we turned it into the connecting thread. The entire event revolved around one question:

> How do we imagine the future of the MICE sector?

To answer it, we had to work, play, create, and reflect. And we did it through a three-day journey: past, present, and future.

Day 1 — Think, Create, and Lay the Foundations

We started with a facilitation session led by our psychologist and trainer Joan Amorós, exploring the past, present, and future of MICE. Participants wrote ideas on cards that we would use later.

Then we shifted energy with our Change activity: a certified game about sustainability and the SDGs—a team challenge centered on three pillars: environment, society, and economy.

With limited time and scarce resources, teams developed projects using a model we would reuse the next day for them to create their own projects about the future of MICE. Nothing was random: everything done that day had narrative connection.

Day 2 — When the Rooms Come Alive

Saturday morning was a journey through the future, and then creating and painting it their own way. Blank canvas; future to design.

The goal: paint on a giant canvas the present and future of MICE through the concepts explored the day before, creativity, and experimentation.

Each hotel room transformed into an experience where participants found the resources they needed to imagine the sector's future:

The Room of Unknowns: boxes with seemingly unrelated objects they had to connect to the future of MICE.
A Future with More Pauses: soft lighting, calm music, and reflections on wellness and the value of "doing nothing."
The Grand Arsenal: creative materials to imagine, prototype, and build ideas.
The Vision: a spotlight illuminated the cards written the day before; the past and present inspired the future.

And finally, the main room: The Atelier of the Future of MICE, where everyone painted a large collective canvas guided by our facilitator. Laughter, spontaneous connections, and shared conclusions emerged.

Saturday Afternoon — 5 Rooms, 5 Challenges

What could have been a simple tour became a gamified experience:

A hidden formula among objects.
A clue visible only through a mirror.
Binoculars pointing to the street, where a team member held a sign with the answer.

The _wow_ effect was immediate. The hotel was experienced, not just observed. With intrigue, anticipation, surprises, and plenty of laughter, participants experienced each room rather than visiting it.

Day 3 — The Detail That Closed the Experience: The Famous WOW Effect

As they left, participants found an unexpected surprise: a piece of the canvas they painted the day before, framed, with a phrase written by themselves during the weekend. A physical memory of a collective experience. A fragment of the future… created as a team.

The Invisible Part: What You Don't See

We had only three weeks to design everything: briefing, meetings, activity testing, material production, real-time printing, team coordination. And we'd never even seen some of the rooms.

We worked from a 3D model —blessed technology—. And when there's trust between client and organizer, speed stops being a problem. Technology and collaboration were our best allies.

Challenges (and Solutions)

Tight timelines: Excel and Trello to the rescue.
Unknown spaces: 3D prototype and creativity.
Last-minute printing: coordination, calm, and staggered planning.
Codes that can't fail: triple check and Plan B.

When the whole team trusts and rolls up their sleeves, even chaos has rhythm.

Results and Learnings

Real engagement: participants explored and experienced each space with genuine curiosity and interest.
Retention: they remembered specific details because they had lived them.
Organic networking: conversations emerged while solving challenges together.
Creative expression: the rooms became living metaphors of the MICE sector.
Emotional impact: a great event isn't just seen, it's felt.

Benefits of Gamifying a Corporate Fam Trip

Greater participation and emotional connection.
Lasting memory thanks to direct experience.
Differentiation from other MICE formats.
Natural integration of hotel branding and narrative.

What We Take Away

From this project, we're left with the idea that the MICE of the future is more human, more creative, and more influenced by collaboration. And that gamification isn't infantilizing: it's professionalizing the experience.

A hotel can be much more than a space: it can be a stage for ideas, reflection, and shared energy.

Conclusion

Organizing a corporate event is like painting a collective canvas: each person contributes a piece of their talent, and the final result is much bigger than you imagined.