How to decide where to go as a group

Budget is the thing nobody says out loud, and it is the thing that decides the trip. Somebody in your group has a much lower ceiling than the loudest suggestion, and finding that out after the house is booked is worse for everyone, including them. So ask each person privately for a number, which arrives on a page and is easier than a conversation.

Flight time is the second filter, because four hours for six people and eleven for two is two different trips wearing one name. Weight the decision by whoever has the longest journey, or pick a boringly fair hub, since Nashville and Austin keep winning US votes for exactly that reason.

Cutting to three is mechanical, once you accept the order. Drop anything that breaks the lowest ceiling, then anything needing more days off than the group has, then anything where the cheapest flight is a red-eye for more than one person. If nothing survives, the dates are the problem, so move the weekend before you argue about the map.

Once the list is down to three, vote and move on. The gap in quality between your top two candidates is almost always smaller than the cost of another fortnight of deliberation, which is the part nobody prices in. Put the winner on the shared itinerary the same hour, so it stops reopening in a side chat.

Give each of the three options one line of trade-off: cheaper flights, a shorter hop for the West Coast people, a downtown you can walk. Then set a deadline measured in hours, because first-past-the-post works and ranked choice works, while an open thread with no closing time will still be running in March.

If you have two people who decline to vote, they live with the result anyway. Reopening "what if we did mountains" after the house is booked is how groups lose deposits and friends lose patience. Planning with friends is the rest of the operating system, while this page only locks the destination.

A place that is a two-hour hop for five people and a red-eye for one will come back as resentment, even after the photos won the vote. Weight by the longest journey, or pick somewhere boringly fair, since Nashville, Austin, Denver, and Chicago all work for US groups spread across two coasts.

Dream lists ("we should all go to Bali") belong to a later trip with a higher ceiling and more days off, because this quarter's trip has to clear a lower bar. For the trip you are booking now, the city everyone can reach and afford beats the city one person found in a reel at midnight.

Run the vote in 48 hours, with three named options, one line of trade-off each, and a hard close. Record the winner on the plan while the replies are still fresh, because a decision nobody wrote down is a decision that gets relitigated.

One thing worth saying early: somebody in the group will be quietly relieved when the expensive option loses, which makes cheap and close a fine answer. Most of the group trips people still talk about are the affordable ones, because those are the ones where everybody managed to come.