When GPC Asia Pacific arrived at Waterman Business Centre in Chadstone for their Melbourne strategy day, they had a specific requirement: the team building activity had to happen right there, at Chadstone, without transporting people across the city after a full day of conference sessions.
Urban Quest’s response was to build the experience around them — designing a custom on-site team building event that used the full Chadstone precinct as its playing field, starting and finishing at the Waterman Business Centre, and running entirely across the shopping and outdoor areas in between.
The result worked well enough that Urban Quest has kept the Chadstone experience as a permanent ready-to-go offering. Any group can now book it.
The Group and the Brief
GPC Asia Pacific brought together a small, senior group of 12 participants — a deliberately tight number for a high-level strategy day. With team members joining from New Zealand alongside the Australian contingent, this was a merging group in the most practical sense: people who work for the same organisation but don’t necessarily work alongside each other day to day.
Twelve participants made three perfect teams of four — small enough that every person had a meaningful role in every challenge, with nowhere to coast and no team large enough to carry a passive participant.
The brief had two clear requirements. The activity needed to start and finish at Waterman Business Centre, keeping the day’s logistics clean and self-contained. And the entire event — including the activity itself — needed to land within two hours. Urban Quest delivered both: approximately 1.5 hours of gameplay with the full event, including briefing and wrap-up, sitting just over two hours.
Team Activator First — Then the Stakes Get Higher
Because this was a merging group with members flying in from New Zealand, the priority before any competition began was establishing genuine communication between people who hadn’t worked together in person. GPC Asia Pacific specifically requested the Team Activator as a pre-game session for exactly this reason.
The Team Activator runs before the main experience, giving teams a structured warm-up that builds communication channels and establishes working rhythms before the pressure of the competitive game begins. For a group where some participants were meeting face to face for the first time, this was the difference between teams that spend the first twenty minutes of gameplay figuring each other out and teams that hit the ground running.
By the time GPC Asia Pacific’s three teams moved into the main experience, they already had the foundations in place. The game raised the stakes — every challenge counted, every decision had a consequence, every second on the clock mattered — and the teams were ready to perform rather than still warming up.
Chadstone as a Playing Field
Chadstone Shopping Centre is not an obvious team building venue. But it has qualities that make it exceptionally well-suited for a custom Urban Quest experience — qualities that Urban Quest’s design team identified and built around.
The precinct is large. Large enough to run groups of 100 or more across its various levels, thoroughfares, outdoor areas, and landmarks without any logistical issues or waiting for space to clear. For GPC Asia Pacific’s group of 12, the space felt expansive and genuinely exploratory.
The infrastructure is diverse. The mix of indoor shopping levels, outdoor plazas, prominent architectural features, and distinctive retail landmarks gives Urban Quest’s challenge designers a rich set of reference points for clues, navigation challenges, and location-based tasks. Every answer is anchored to something real and specific — something teams have to find, observe, and interact with — which makes the experience feel like a genuine city exploration rather than a generic activity that could happen anywhere.
The weather contingency is built in. Urban Quest’s designers deliberately selected outdoor areas that remain substantially undercover even in wet weather — meaning the experience runs regardless of conditions without teams getting drenched between challenges. For a Melbourne winter strategy day, this is not a small consideration.
Starting and finishing at the Waterman Business Centre means the group never had to manage their own logistics. Conference bags, jackets, laptops — everything stayed secure at the venue while teams moved through the precinct. At the end of the experience, everyone returned to the same room they’d started in, with results announced and the day concluded in a single space.
What a Custom On-Site Event Actually Involves
For event organisers considering a custom Urban Quest experience at their own venue or a location of their choice, the GPC Asia Pacific event illustrates how the process works in practice.
Urban Quest’s team conducts a site assessment before the event — walking the venue, identifying challenge locations, testing navigation logic, and designing a route that works for the group size and the available space. For Chadstone, that assessment identified which outdoor areas provided adequate weather cover, which indoor landmarks were distinctive enough to anchor challenges, and how to sequence the route so teams spread naturally across the precinct without congestion.
The game itself runs on Urban Quest’s smartphone-guided platform — no paper, no printed maps, no materials to manage on the day. Teams receive their instructions, submit their answers, and navigate between locations entirely through the platform. The host manages the briefing, monitors progress, and runs the final wrap-up and results announcement.
For GPC Asia Pacific, the entire design was built around their specific requirements: their venue, their group size, their time constraints, and their objective of connecting a geographically distributed senior team before a strategy day concluded. The experience delivered on all of them.
Now Available at Chadstone
The Chadstone experience that Urban Quest designed for GPC Asia Pacific is now available as a ready-to-go offering for any group. The route has been tested, the challenges are built, and the logistics are proven. Groups from small senior teams through to large conference cohorts of 100 or more can book it without requiring the full custom design lead time of a brand new location.
For Melbourne-based organisations hosting events at Chadstone — whether at Waterman Business Centre or elsewhere in the precinct — it offers a seamless add-on to a conference or strategy day that requires no external venue, no transport, and no additional logistics beyond arriving at the start point.
For organisations wanting a similar experience at their own venue or a location of their choice, the GPC Asia Pacific event is a practical demonstration of what Urban Quest’s custom on-site team building format delivers: a fully hosted, technology-driven experience designed around your space, your group, and your objectives.
To read about another large-scale custom Urban Quest experience, see how Sportsbet brought 700 people together at Marvel Stadium — a different scale, a different brief, and the same principle: the venue becomes the experience.
Urban Quest delivered a custom on-site team building experience for GPC Asia Pacific at Chadstone, including a Team Activator pre-game session. The Chadstone experience is now available as a ready-to-go offering for corporate groups of any size.
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