Tired of planning trips for your friends?

Are you tired of being the one who plans each friend trip? I’ve been in those shoes too and it’s pretty exhausting. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

Some trips don’t need much planning. For trips fitting the following criteria, it’s actually quite feasible to be less strict about it:

• Visiting a safe country or region with which you are already familiar.
• It’s a shorter trip.
• It’s a small group and you are all good friends with each other. (Do not combine different friend groups together.)
• You don’t really mind not having your way. In other words, you’re okay with not having full control over the trip’s itinerary, and the group can do an equal proportion of each friend’s activity ideas.
• The activities don’t necessarily require advance reservations.
• You are already pretty familiar with travel and you do not need to do much preparation for travel in general. (Rule of thumb: can you be ready to travel domestically if given less than one hour to prepare?)

Here’s a few possible ways to fix the problem of being too tired to plan trips for your friends. Choose the one that best fits your situation.

Split up the work

Nobody says that you have to do all of the trip planning. The easiest way to avoid becoming overworked during the planning phase is to distribute the workload.

Give each person some ownership for the trip. When people have some skin in the game, they tend to be more motivated to participate and put in effort. They will also be happier with the decisions and less surprised when the trip happens. (If you plan together and they are not happy with the decisions, then you will have learned that they might not be a good tripmate before it’s too late.)

For this trip, every person gets to come up with ideas of what they want to do. Share them among each other. All of the ideas that everyone has in common will take first priority. Then, the individual preference ideas can be sorted out and divvied up in the remaining time.

Why stay in the same hotels together when each person can just have their own accommodations? If people really want to stay together, they should put in their combined equal efforts to book the accommodations together. Don’t help someone book their hotel unless they put in the same effort you’re putting in. Otherwise, you’re enabling them to rely on you for the entire trip.

Make everyone have to earn the coordination. Don’t force people onto Zoom calls; they’ll want to participate in planning once they realize the importance and urgency.

Reverse psychology

Does the above not work? That’s fine; it won’t work for a lot of friends. That’s where reverse psychology comes in. This is for situations when your friend is interested enough in the destination to actually start to research it (instead of just feigning interest). Don’t do the work just because you think they won’t do it. Maybe they will do it if you don’t do it!

Hook them onto the idea and tell them you’re interested in going to the destination. If your friend agrees, let them know that you’ll only go if they plan it. Still have your own outlines of ideas as a backup, but let them steer.

Go ahead and book your own refundable hotel (and rental car, if necessary) reservations. Then you can cancel them if their planning falls through. Otherwise, at least you have your own stuff in order.

Have some ideas of what you want to do in the back of your mind. Some or all of them will be on the backburner. Any of your ideas that are must-dos can still be shared with your friend, and you can plan those parts out. After all, if they are your idea, you’ll be the one best suited to design the plan of visiting it. (But in the interest of not stressing yourself out, maybe don’t do any particularly big ideas.)

Once you both arrive, I recommend still offering the friend a bit of advice when needed. If you know how to get from the airport to the hotel, don’t let them get lost at the airport. Instead, let them try their hardest and help them out as needed. They’ll eventually have to get around without you anyway.

This worked very well with one of my close friends, with whom I now take annual trips to New York City.

Wing it

If all fails, go for the nuclear option: winging it. Sometimes you really don’t even need to make your tripmates plan anything. You can always simply go together and decide what to do during the ride there or even once you get to the hotel. As long as you have the flights, hotel, and possible rental car reserved, things can easily come together.

For instance, I live in Seattle. Recently, I went with a close friend (not the same one as in the previous section) on a weekend trip to Victoria, British Columbia by ferry. We already booked our ferry ride, hotel, and rental car ahead of time, and I confirmed with the hotel that the parking fee would be covered by our Amex Fine Hotel & Resort credit, so there was not much other planning we had to worry about. I also didn’t really tell my friend what we were scheduled to do, except that we’d be visiting the famous Butchart Gardens after we picked up our rental car.

We ended up winging most of the trip. Here’s why that worked:

• I already went to Victoria 10 years ago with my family, so I was familiar enough with it that I didn’t need much inspiration. Meanwhile, my friend had already been to Canada a few times at this point.
• On board the ferry, we sat next to a lady, who gave us some of her recommendations: the Victoria Chinatown, afternoon tea, etc.—we ended up following most, if not all, of her recommendations. It’s the magical wonders of socializing with fellow passengers while going to your destination! Chances are, someone sitting next to you knows a lot about the destination.
• My friend and I are close enough to the point where we felt comfortable proposing what to do next and we agreed on everything we did. Not once did we argue about our plans. Half the things we did ended up being my idea and the other half were his idea. That made things smooth and neither of us ever felt like the trip wasn’t going our way.
• There is enough in Canada that’s similar to the United States that I felt comfortable winging it, and I also didn’t worry about him forgetting anything important, because we only stayed for one night, we both have credit cards with zero foreign transaction fees, I brought a phone that was capable of making free calls from Canada, and the power plugs are the same in Canada as in the U.S.
• Our phones had eSIM support, so we just bought Canada eSIMs while riding the ferry and activated them in the harbor before we even got off the boat.
• Even better, both of us had Washington State enhanced driver licenses, so when we got to the ferry terminal, it didn’t matter if we “forgot” to bring our passports; we didn’t need them.

To summarize things, winging it worked well in this case because we were good friends, Canada wasn’t anything foreign to us.