This article is intended to help you organise 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 verity of people in mind. You may be an allocated tour committee member,
Social sectary, Club president; or you may be a manager having been asked to organise a corporate trip. You may also be a best man organising a stag do or simply organising a holiday for a large group of friends.
Where to Start
If you have not organised group travel before you are probably thinking 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 organising 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 organise kit and clothing
– Who will sell the tour to your group and convince them to go.
– Who will organise your group – make sure they all have up-to-date passports, organise rooming lists, and carry out any other administration that needs to be done.
– Fundraising
If you want to contact hotels directly you can find a list of hotels and their details on the web site http://www.in-holidays-europe.co.uk for Europe, America, Canada, Asia and Africa. To get comparison booking quotes for group hotels try visiting http://www.mygrouptour.com
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 you 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 organisers out there such as MyGroupTour who will be full of ideas and have probably done something similar before. Contacting a professional group organiser will not cost you anything and will enable you to pick their brains. MyGroupTour and a number of others 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 suite your needs. You can also do research in to destinations on the web by using web sites such as Trip Adviser to help get some ideas. 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 know 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 know one wants to stay in, which again may put them off coming.
You need to derive 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 realise 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 and 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 subsidising 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 your self. In most group bookings you should be able to get a free hotel bed for every 10 members in the group although coach prices are not normally affected.
