They are a San Francisco tech company with an office in Utah. Everybody from Utah who joins the company gets to fly to San Francisco and spend several days there for the onboarding process. That was super nice, but obviously expensive. 

However, apart from the nice travel to San Francisco, the onboarding process included several helpful things:

1) The IT department got my laptop all setup and running during the onboarding process. This was critical since there were some tricky things that had to be done that would have been a pain in the neck without this. It turns out there was an error in the way my laptop was pre-configured that prohibited access to some critical corporate network areas. Having the setup be done during onboarding saved several days to a week of unnecessary work that I would have had to do by myself. 

2) They explained all the benefits in detail, which was useful since it gave a thorough review of the health insurance which included numerous plans. There were some quircky things in the Health plans that we would have not known about without someone explaining in person about them. This ended up saving me about $900 a year. 

3) The onboarding process allowed us to meet many key people in the company before we had to actually work with them. We had lunch with them at a nice restaurant in San Francisco that was nice. It goes a long way to meet the people that you will work with before you start to face the daily pressures of work.