sprout Summary
misc notes about organizing longer group trips. TODO
The moment a plan goes multi-day or involves long distance travel, the difficulty of organizing it multiplies.
The primary difference compared to smaller-scale event planning is that everyone is part of the buy-in crew. There’s no room for attendees or slackers anymore.* If any one person in your group can’t make it, be ready to reschedule around them or be ok with kicking them out.
Here are a few tips:
- Set a hard go/no-go deadline. This is usually the last date you can cancel flights, reservations, and housing accommodations at a low cost.
- Make a requirement for joining the trip be to pay in full by this deadline. If someone hasn’t paid by now, don’t ever expect them to.
- You can allow last-minute RSVP’s after this date, but stragglers must willing to book their own tickets and housing. Trying to squeeze them into the existing group is not worth the trouble for you.
- Check carefully for bad weather, incidents, and other potential trip-ruining events shortly before making the go/no-go call.
- Be careful about letting too many cooks into the kitchen. Someone (probably you) should communicate your intent to be the main point-person for making reservations, confirming itineraries, and delivering executive decisions.
- If too many people have strong (and opposing) opinions on where to stay and what to do, it’s totally ok to plan on splitting up. Group travel with more than 4-5 people is really, really hard to pull off.
- Followers who don’t help with planning but are down to do whatever and pay for whatever are a blessing!
- Generally, the more risk someone takes on (financially or responsibility-wise), the more right they should have to call the shots. Earn your right to doing a thing you really want to do by taking care of everything related to it!
- Expect hangriness: your party will be tired, hungry, and highly irritable at some point during the trip. Bad decisions will be made, and you’ll probably hate each other for a while.
- Make sure to take breaks, get food, get a nap in before trying to improvise or otherwise make big decisions on the spot.
- Go at the pace of the most tired person!
- Refer to the Anthropocene Reviewed episode “Icelandic Hot Dog Stand” for an example of how you can still make things work if people have different tolerances for the pace of travel.