Kingsport
Though most of Tennessee is a paradise for park lovers, Kingsport might be one of the best places to be to take advantage of the full variety of Tennessee’s natural wealth. While it’s convenient to five nearby national parks and 15 state parks, Kingsport is also home to a 3,500-acre nature preserve and reservoir and serves as the beginning of the Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail, long the main path through the frontier.
Kingsport offers groups many ways to take their meeting or team building outside, particularly at the city’s Bays Mountain Park, home to a planetarium and an adventure course, which are both available for private rental. For a trip back in time, Exchange Place, a living-history museum, can host groups for historical craft classes, or groups can go high-tech at NASCAR’s Bristol Motor Speedway with car-racing simulators.
The city’s main meeting space, the 35,000-square-foot MeadowView Conference Resort and Convention Center, with amphitheater and ballroom options that can be subdivided into 17 breakout rooms, is connected to a 195-room Marriott hotel.
Chattanooga
While many people associate Tennessee with the Smoky Mountains, some of the best views can be found on the Cumberland Plateau in the southeast portion of the state around Chattanooga thanks to 1,850-foot-high Lookout Mountain, from which visitors can see up to seven states on a clear day.
“Everything is extremely close,” said Ed Dolliver, vice president of sales for the Chattanooga Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. “You have to appreciate that the outdoors are five minutes away; it’s not like it takes a big drive from downtown events. If you want to hike, there’s a 30-mile trail system eight miles from downtown.”
The CVB also works with groups to maximize exclusive ways they can bring their groups outside without leaving downtown, such as closing off the Walnut Street Bridge for a private dinner over the water.
Chattanooga, which has twice been named by Outside magazine as the “best town ever,” has just about every outdoor team-building activity a group could possibly want, from hang gliding and skydiving to caving and whitewater rafting.
Directly downtown, where everything is linked with free eco-friendly shuttle transportation, the more than 100,000-square-foot Chattanooga Convention Center is the primary event location, but the CVB can work with groups looking for more unusual spaces, like a gallery at the Tennessee Aquarium or the Hunter Museum of American Art.
Sewanee
Sewanee is the kind of college town where the boundaries between the 2,300 residents and 1,500 students are so blurred that many simply refer to the University of the South as Sewanee.
Sewanee’s primary venues for meetings and overnight stays are the Sewanee Inn, located at the entrance to campus, and the St. Mary’s Episcopal Center, a retreat center. The 43-room inn offers 8,000 square feet of meeting space, including a 3,472-square-foot ballroom that can accommodate up to 550 people; St. Mary’s offers a newly constructed building with 20 sleeping rooms and private meeting space, in addition to the original dorm-style rooms in St. Mary’s Hall.
According to Michael Beutel, general manager of the Sewanee Inn, the main activity visitors incorporate into their meetings is simply hiking in the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountain forests. Many trails, such as the Sewanee Perimeter Trail, begin right on campus, an easy walk from the inn,. Groups can drive to the entrance to the Natural Bridge path, which leads to a naturally formed 25-foot-high sandstone arch.
Because Sewanee’s lodging and event spaces need to accommodate the university first and foremost, there are several times of year that it is hard for outside events to book, most notably homecoming and parents’ weekends in the fall and commencement in the spring, although some long-standing outside events, such as the prestigious Sewanee Writers’ Conference in the summer, can also cause conflicts.
