“Business is picking up.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard more frequently over the last few months from clients, colleagues and friends. With business, comes travel—more frequent business travel and the return of family vacations and leisure travel.

While it will take time for our wounded economy to recover completely, for many in the travel and tourism industry, the tide is finally starting to turn. With the high tide comes opportunity. Opportunity to build innovative products and solutions. Opportunity to recreate your brand and more effectively resonate with travelers. Opportunity to create a fresh perspective about your properties.

So how do you take advantage of these opportunities? As business begins ramping up again, taking time away from your daily tasks to focus on the future and the strategies to help you succeed in our changed world becomes increasingly important. Corporate retreats and vision sessions provide an ideal way to bring teams together to innovate, strategize, rejuvenate and map a plan for moving forward. Thinking now about ways to improve customer service and guest amenities can be a good way to get started.

I’ve found that while no two vision sessions are the same, you can increase the likelihood of finding some “aha” moments by using several best practices that lead to a successful retreat. You will walk away with new ideas, insights and strategies that never may have surfaced otherwise. And, more importantly, your re-energized team will be poised to create magic back at the office—the momentum, focus and positive energy continue after everyone returns to their “day job.” Here are four keys to creating effective retreats:

Escape the office. Have you ever noticed that some of your best ideas come when you’re not at work? Practice what you preach. Getting away from it all is a big part of what sustains the idea of travel. A little excursion could be just the prescription for your own team to gain some perspective to ramp up for peak travel seasons. Taking retreats off-site helps attendees break away from their daily routine and mindset. You’ll find a new environment helps spark creativity and reflection. As you focus on the big picture, uninhibited by day-to-day workplace distractions, you’ll think more freely. The right location can feel like a refuge from the daily grind and become a wonderful catalyst for innovation.

Engage a third-party partner. Bringing a fresh perspective and new ideas to the table is essential to the success of a vision session. A good strategist and facilitator not only develops a customized session based on your core issues and challenges, he or she listens and uncovers key insights and opportunities less obvious to those who live and breathe the business every day. Look for a partner who can share trends, and offer an outside opinion on today’s travel industry and how your business can plan for the future. For most of us, it can be difficult to stay up on industry and consumer trends while keeping an eye on the bottom line. So, let this be an area where you invite others to help.

Encourage participation. Play. Innovate. Engage. And, yes even relax. The most successful retreats stem from collaboration and open-minded participation in the process. Not only will your collective worldview lead to the best solutions, working together in new ways helps your team recharge its batteries and get the creative juices flowing again.

The best ideas can come from unexpected places; invite a variety of perspectives into the room. Everyone within your company has something to share about their personal travel experiences or stories relayed to them by family and friends. Perhaps you can even bring some of your best customers into this conversation—find out what makes your experience stand out for them and look for new ways to recreate that feeling for new and returning guests. Travelers naturally become fickle if you don’t give them believable reasons to come back to you.

Be Pragmatic. Know what you don’t know. Identify what works and admit what doesn’t. Now is the time to reflect on strengths and weaknesses of your business model and think about what can sustain you through another downturn if it were to happen tomorrow. Keeping your finger on the pulse of the hospitality industry and striving to remain relevant among your key target markets requires constant reinvention, and you don’t want to miss an opportunity to innovate because you were too focused on today.

When you escape the day-to-day, engage an outside strategic partner and encourage all participants to actively take part in the process, you experience the fresh perspectives and solutions needed to help take advantage of available opportunities and challenge the status quo. Your retreat becomes the springboard to positioning your company for success in the months and years ahead. The possibilities are endless if you trust the process.

Katy Briggs is vice president, brand strategy, at Willoughby Design, a Kansas City-based strategic brand design and innovation firm. Her extensive corporate and agency experience includes work for brands such as Build-A-Bear Workshop and Helzberg Diamonds.