Far from your father’s conference center, Chaminade is the old guard of a new breed of meeting facilities.
Although making tremendous strides in recent years—as evidenced by IACC’s Copper Skillet Award—conference centers have never been known as offering a five-star culinary product.
One conference center that has always excelled in F&B, however, is Santa Cruz, Calif.’s Chaminade Resort & Spa, and its Farm to Table program, featuring the Central Coast region’s phenomenal locally grown agricultural products, is a surefire palate-pleaser for groups.
Held from spring through fall on varying dates, Chaminade pairs local wines with a locavore bounty spotlighting area farms and ranches, all in an elegant setting overlooking Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay from the property’s vantage point on 300 unpopulated acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Meeting planners can reserve up to 90 seats for the dinners—or arrange a complete, private buyout—at the AAA Four Diamond Mission-style property, which offers 156 guest rooms and 44 suites. And while at first glance Chaminade resembles more a luxury hillside retreat property than a purpose-built conference center, the property boasts an IACC accreditation and meeting features that include a dedicated conference concierge, 12,000 square feet of indoor and 13,500 square feet of outdoor meeting and event space, and signature team-building programs such as geo-caching, a ropes course challenge, boat building and scavenger hunts in the surrounding redwood forest.
