Group Travel – How to Organize It

This article is intended to help you organize successful group travel; whether you are new to group travel organisation or are simply looking to improve on your experiences. It is aimed at a variety of people in mind. You may be an allocated tour committee member, Social secretary, Club president; or you may be a manager having been asked to organize a corporate trip. You may also be a best man organizing a stag ‘do’ or simply organizing a holiday for a large group of friends.

Where to Start

If you have not organised group travel before you are probably tripsite where do I start? If you have organised group travel before and it did not go so smoothly you should be asking – where should I have started last time?

The first thing you need to decide is who will be responsible for what, make sure those roles are clearly defined, and that the individuals understand their responsibilities. The number of people who need to be involved in organizing group travel will vary depending on your group and destination. For small and informal groups you may decide that you will take responsibility for all the tasks. For large and more formal groups it is often best to assign tasks to multiple people.

You should consider:

• Who will be responsible for collecting money?
• For sports or performing arts groups – who will organize kit and clothing
• Who will sell the tour to your group and convince them to go.
• Who will organize your group – make sure they all have up-to-date passports, organize rooming lists, and carry out any other administration that needs to be done.
• Fundraising- if required

Idea brainstorming

Once you have decided on these responsibilities you need to come up with some general ideas of where your group should go and what they should do. In some cases this will be easy as other factors will have already pre-determined this. If you are a sports group and are organising a trip for a sports tournament, your destination and main activity will have already been set. In this situation you should consider what other activities you may also want to do in order that you get the most enjoyment out of your trip.

In many cases brainstorming will be a much more involved process. If you are a music group wishing to go on tour then the options are almost endless with regards to destinations, concerts and itineraries.

You will probably need to do some research into ideas for your group and the brainstorming process could take several weeks. Why not get some ideas from the experts! There are a number of professional group travel organizers out there who will be full of ideas and have probably done something similar before. Contacting a professional group organizer will not cost you anything and will enable you to pick their brains. A number of group travel organizers also provide a large collection of pre-built itineraries on their web sites. You may be able to take one of these directly or adapt it to meet your needs. You can also do research in to destinations on the web by using web sites such as ‘Trip Adviser’ or ‘In Europe’ to help get some ideas. If you are traveling in Britain then use visit britain. This is a great web site with lots of useful information. As well as destination and itineraries you will need to think about approximate date of travel, likely numbers, accommodation type, and extra excursions that you might want to do.

Budget

A group’s budget is very important. If you create an over priced trip or holiday then no one from your group will be able to come. Equally if you set the budget so low, then you will end up in accommodation that no one wants to stay in, which again may put them off coming.

You need to agree a price range that you think your group can afford and create your trip based on that. If you want to go on a week’s tour to Europe but realize that your group can only realistically afford £100 each then you will need to consider fundraising or making an adjustment to your tour in terms of time length, destination or itinerary.

Remember any group can afford a tour it just takes the right amount of planning, creativity and preparation. Some members may have a particularly difficult economic background. You may want to consider subsidizing these members from the clubs funds and fundraising. Some people may also be prepared to pay more in order to reduce the cost to others. You should also take into consideration free places for yourself. In most group bookings you should be able to get a free hotel bed for every 25 members in the group although coach prices are not normally affected.

Getting your group together

The first step is in persuading people to go on your group trip. There are three main factors that decide this. Does the trip appeal to them, is it at a price they can afford and how charismatic are you at selling them the idea! If you can get these three things right then you should have no problem in getting most of your group to go on the trip.