Group Travel – How to Organize It Part 1
A guide covering the main parts of how to organize group travel, including where to start, brainstorming, budgeting, raising money, organization and other useful things you may not have considered.
This article is intended to help you organize successful group travel; whether you are new to group travel organization 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 organise a corporate trip. You may also be a best man organizing a stag ‘do’ or simply organising a holiday for a large group of friends.
Where to Start
If you have not organized group travel before you are probably thinking where do I start? If you have organized 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 organisers out there such as MyGroupTour 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. 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 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.
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