4 Tips for Group-Friendly Travel
Traveling with your entire squad means you can leave the selfie stick at home because you’ll never run out of photographers. It also means splitting rental fees, collaborating on vacay planning, and built-in people to bar-hop with. But jetsetting in a group can turn into a total sadventure if you’re not prepared. The good news is that you don’t have to shoulder all of the planning burden yourself—you can delegate to members of your crew and spend the extra time perfecting your beach-selfie-face. Here are four tips for traveling with friends that will make your next group vacay go smoothly.
- Designate your point-people. If you put the same person (or yourself) in charge of booking everything, not only with that friend get totally overwhelmed, but he also might end up getting temporarily stiffed on Venmo from friends who need to wait until their next paycheck to chip in their share. To avoid frustration among your friends, designate different point-people to tackle different aspects of the trip. For instance, your most organized friend might want to take charge when it comes to finding a place to stay. Another could figure out how you’re going to get from the airport to the hotel. You can even divide up days and let different people plan the schedule. You may want to set a budget that everyone agrees to before diving right in here, though.
- AirBNB or VRBO entire houses. There’s nothing worse than spending a day traveling, rolling into your hotel, and realizing you’ve crammed five people in every room. That’s not very conducive for restful post-plane napping. When you have a big crew, consider renting an entire house or apartment instead of hotel rooms. It’ll probably end up being cheaper (or at least comparable), and you’ll all have some room to spread out. With the added perk of being able to cook your own food instead of going out every night, you’ll definitely cut down on your vacay budget. Two of the most popular vacation home websites right now are AirBNB and VRBO. Both websites let you search house and apartments for rent by their owners, complete with customer reviews to help you weed out the stinkers.
- Don’t overload your itinerary. You should come up with some kind of loose itinerary before embarking on your trip—or your vacay Insta is going to end up looking pretty pathetic—but don’t overdo it. All of your friends move at different speeds, so allow plenty of time for napping and relaxing. Plan one or two activities per day, not including going out for meals, and make as many of them optional as possible so people can bail last-minute if they really just need a pool day.
- Collaborate via the interwebs. Instead of constantly emailing or texting your entire crew, set up a private Facebook group or a Google doc where everyone can stay on top of what’s going on. Post updates about budget, lodging bookings, and potential vacation activities so that people can give a quick yea or nay before anything is set in stone.
How to (Happily) Travel with a Group [Yes and Yes]
8 Essential Tips for Group Travel [Oyster.com]
Group Travel Tips – Plan a Family or Friend-Filled Vacation [Tourist meets Traveler]