In the last decade, I’ve led over 250 nature retreats, outdoor workshops and hiking adventures. During that time, I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t when selling out retreats and group experiences.
Just a few years ago before the pandemic, it was relatively easy to run ads on Google Ads and Meta Ads to sell out retreats but in the last couple of years with the rise of artificial intelligence, the way marketing and sales are done has changed.
Today, the web and social media are flooded with average, formulaic and divisive content with the result that people are unplugging from all this mindless scrolling and craving more authentic and meaningful connections that can only be found in a community.
While AI can do a lot of things much better than the average person, it will never be able to replace community, human connection and group leadership. In fact, in the coming age of artificial intelligence, these will likely be some of the most valuable and high-paid skills.
That’s why I believe to sell out your retreats in 2025 you need to build an online community where you can share your expertise and help people through courses, coaching and workshops. This also allows you to make your retreat business much more profitable because you can sell pre-retreat preparation and post-retreat integration, as well as enroll more students in your high ticket coaching programs.
Let’s face it, personal transformation is hard. That’s why transformational retreats and being a part of a community is to be surrounded by people with shared goals, values and aspirations who will hold us accountable and provide emotional support along the difficult journey to elevating our mindset and building new habits that stick.
If you would like to spend your time more efficiently and host a sold-out retreat in 2025, here’s what I would recommend focusing your time on doing:
1. Clarify your offer before you plan and market your retreat.
You need to be crystal clear about exactly who your retreat is for and what outcome or transformation they will achieve by attending your retreat. Clarifying your offer is the most important part of selling out a transformational retreat because if you don’t sell the right experience to the right person, then it’s going to be a struggle to run profitable retreats.
Your offer must be clear and concise before you start to plan, market and sell any kind of international retreat as most retreat leaders fail because their offer is weak. The best way to validate your offer is by using your online community to gauge people’s interest and speaking with clients directly on insight calls.
2. Build an online community so you can easily pre-sell your retreats.
It’s very difficult to get someone to book an international retreat that they see posted on a retreat directory or social media somewhere. To sell out this kind of retreat, you need to have a marketing process so you can get them to know, like and trust you over time.
In 2025, the most effective way to do this is by building an online community where you can regularly send your members emails and posts through push notifications that include valuable resources, group coaching and workshops with them. Having a community allows you to pre-sell your retreats and validate your offers before you commit to paying 1,000’s of dollars to book a retreat venue.
3. You should be able to explain the transformation they will receive in 1-2 sentences.
The key to great storytelling in your marketing is to craft a compelling brand story that speaks to the desires and needs of the ideal person you want to serve at your retreat. In your brand story, you need to be clear and concise about the transformation they will leave your retreat with.
Most retreat leaders focus too much on the location, food and experience. You need to clarify why they will book with you rather than the hundreds of other similar options at their fingertips. If you can’t easily explain the transformation they will walk away with in 1-2 sentences then you need to clarify your offer and write a brand story that conveys your transformational offer to earn the right people’s attention.
4. Create a system to book appointments and sell people over the phone.
The key to selling a high ticket retreat is to get people on the phone or Zoom. If you aren’t good at getting your leads to book an appointment, you should hire an appointment setter or use an AI-powered appointment setter which are now almost as good as a well-trained person.
People aren’t going to invest thousands of dollars with you and book time off work to fly across the world unless they have spoken with you and you have dealt with all their questions and concerns. The best way to do this is over the phone and then having email sequences to consistently follow up with them until they are ready to book.
5. Collaborate with other coaches, practitioners and facilitators.
From my experience, leading a weeklong retreat with only one facilitator can be exhausting and lead to periods of burnout after the retreat experience ends. That’s why I recommend you collaborate with 2-4 other facilitators so you can sit back, relax and enjoy your retreat without feeling overwhelmed.
Seek out people who already have established communities, email lists and clientele that actively follow them. I also recommend setting up an affiliate tracking system so that each person gets paid based on how many retreat participants they bring. With an affiliate program in place, it’s also easy to reach out to big influencers and creators to negotiate profitable joint ventures.
6. Email outreach can be effective in attracting participants and collaborators.
Start by reaching out to people in your network who already know, like and trust you to ask if they want to be an affiliate to help cross-promote and get paid for the referrals. This helps you get them interested in your retreat and you may even enroll them as participants or fellow facilitators.
After you have reached out and engaged people you know with warm outreach, you can start doing cold outreach to attract both participants and collaborators. There are lots of inexpensive outreach tools for LinkedIn, Facebook and Email that simplify the outreach process and make it much easier to reach 100s of highly-targeted prospects quickly.
7. Focus on 2-3 marketing channels that you enjoy creating content for.
Find the marketing activities that you enjoy and focus on only 2-3 channels. Personally, I hate scrolling all day on social media because I find it toxic to my brain so I focus my marketing efforts on email outreach, appointment setters and running paid Meta and Google Ads.
As I have said earlier, the best way to inexpensively attract leads in 2025 is to run ads to get interested people to join an online community where you can provide lots of value. With a basic community-driven funnel, you can get community signups for $5-10 and appointment bookings to learn more about joining your retreats for $50-$150, depending on how well you optimize the ads and funnel.
8. Set up retargeting ads on your website to keep people engaged.
If you are sending people to your website from content marketing or ads, you must have inexpensive retargeting ads that keep people engaged. The reason why this is crucial is because today people need a minimum of 7-10 interactions with your brand before they are ready to buy and if you don’t re-engage them most people will never remember to visit your website again.
Retargeting ads allow you to keep showing ads to people on Facebook, Instagram and Google’s display advertising network. You can keep them engaged with lead magnets like cheatsheets, checklists and guides or have them join your online community where you can offer workshops, Q&A calls and group coaching to help.
9. Create content that makes it easy for people to find you on Google.
Search engine optimization (SEO) remains one of the best ways to attract people who are searching for what you offer. If you run transformational retreats locally, it’s often not very difficult to rank for people searching for coaches, practitioners and facilitators in your local area.
If you are running international retreats regularly in different locations, there are several retreat marketplaces that are already highly optimized for SEO that you can leverage. However, you often will pay a 10-20% booking fee and from my experience, your time is better spent running Google Ads targeting key location-based search keywords if your offer and transformation are strong.
10. Get a marketing automation platform that integrates all your promotions.
You should price at least 50-100 hours of your time into your retreat package for planning and promoting your retreat. If you want to get optimal value from your time and know exactly what is working for appointment bookings and sales, then you need a marketing automation platform.
While most people have different tools, having an integrated all-in-one tool can save you a lot of time and tech overwhelm. That’s why I use the HighLevel platform so you can integrate everything without being a tech wizard while utilizing the latest AI agents to do a lot of the technical and marketing work for you.
Launching Your Transformational Retreat In 2025
I set making a minimum 10K profit from a weeklong international retreat as my benchmark. To achieve this outcome, you need to understand the money math and price your offer appropriately so you have enough margin for ad costs, retreat costs and exactly what you want to get paid per hour for all your hard work.
It can take 100s of hours to plan, market and sell your first international retreat so you need to price in all your time at an hourly rate of at least $50/hour. Most retreat leaders don’t do the money math and as a result, they aren’t able to consistently launch and sell out new retreats.
For your transformational retreats to be profitable, you need to have a high margin to cover all the time you will spend planning, marketing and delivering the experience. Also, you have to promise and deliver incredible value in your offer and communicate it clearly in your brand story so participants walk away with the transformation they desire.
If you want to launch your transformational retreat in 2025, I’m going to be doing a workshop on clarifying your offer, brand story and the money math necessary to profitably run online ads to build your online community and sell out your transformational retreats this year.
You can join my next profitable retreat workshop in my Nature Retreats group on Facebook.
His mission at Mindful Ecotourism is to share mindful awareness, experiential learning and community building practices that can reconnect people with nature.
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