Dancer in a feathered headdress holding a smoking incense burner, with the sea behind her

Group ceremonies

Welcome and farewell ceremonies for groups in the Riviera Maya

Your group lands, gets off the bus, walks into the lobby — and instead of a check-in queue, a drum is waiting for them. Copal smoke, feathers, a conch shell, and a welcome that belongs to this land.

It is the first thing Mexico says to them, and it sets the tone for everything that comes after.

Receiving groups since2012

Tell us about your group

Three dancers in feathered headdresses waiting in a hotel lobby before the welcome — Waiting by the entrance, before anyone arrives.

The arrival

When the group walks in

The dancers are there before anyone arrives, standing by the entrance in full regalia while the lobby goes about its day. Then the drum starts, and everything stops: the conversations, the luggage, the phones — which come straight back out to record it.

Nobody has to do anything, and nobody has to know anything beforehand. They are simply received, in the middle of the smoke and the drum, while the rest of the lobby stops to watch.

The same welcome works on the sand, in a garden or at the door of a meeting room. It travels.

Thirteen seconds

This is what it looks like

No sound needed: the drum, the feathers, and a lobby that suddenly belongs to Mexico.

A corporate group gathered around a kneeling dancer in a hotel lobby after the welcome — The group photograph that closes the welcome.

Integration

A circle, not a stage

When the purpose is to bring a team together, the welcome becomes a ceremony they take part in. A woven textile is laid out on the floor and everyone gathers around it.

There is cacao with honey and other seeds, an offering to the earth and to the water, and the same gestures repeated by everyone at the same time. Nothing has to be learned beforehand, and whoever signs off the budget kneels on the same floor as everyone else.

Read how one of these mornings went, with an incentive group brought by Tropical Incentive.

A circle has no head of the table.

Dancers and drums on the beach at dusk, with the group standing in a circle around them — On the sand, when the light goes orange.

The farewell

And when it is time to leave

A farewell ceremony closes what the welcome opened. On the sand, at the hour when the light goes orange, the group gathers one last time: the drum, the copal, and a thank you for what happened during these days.

By then nobody is watching from the outside. They dance. That is usually the photograph everyone keeps.

Guests dancing on the beach at night alongside dancers in feathered headdresses — By the end of the night, the group is dancing too.

Where it happens

On the beach, in the lobby, in a garden

The ceremony adapts to the space your group already has: the sand in front of the hotel, the lobby, a garden, a terrace or a meeting room before the first session.

We work across the Riviera Maya — Playa del Carmen, Cancún, Tulum and the surrounding area — and we can also suggest outdoor locations if your group wants to step outside the hotel. For the evening, there is also a prehispanic show.

How we prepare it

It starts with what your group came for

Before anything else we ask what the meeting is for. A team that is being merged, a sales force that has just closed its year, a family that has not been together in a long time and a retreat that begins tomorrow are four very different mornings.

With that in hand, the ceremony is designed around it: what is said, what is offered, how long it lasts and where it happens. That is what makes the group leave it feeling that it was theirs.