Group Holiday FAQs: The Top 20 Questions Every Organiser Asks

Answer enough organisers’ first emails and you notice the same five questions arriving in every one of them. So here they are, answered the way we’d answer on the phone – straight, with the numbers we actually trust.

How far ahead do people really book?

Further than you think. Butlers in the Buff’s booking records – 100,000+ groups over 20 years – show a median lead time of 82 days – under three months. For a peak summer Saturday that is a squeeze, because large houses are a genuinely finite supply and the good ones go early. For a November midweek, you can be far more relaxed. The practical rule we give every organiser is simple: start looking the week your date is locked, not the week you think you should – because “early” and “on time” are closer together than most groups assume.

What will it cost per person?

GoHen’s 2025–26 research puts the average UK hen do at £203 per person for the two-night core of house and activities, with food, travel and extras on top – and in our experience it is those extras that decide where a weekend’s total lands. The house itself is usually the smallest shock, because it is the one figure that stops moving the day you book. Get a quote for your dates, divide it by the heads who have actually paid a deposit, and you have a number you can say out loud before anyone opens a menu. The costs that catch people out sit downstream of the house – the first supermarket shop, the damage deposit float, and taxis if the house is rural – so ask about all three before you finalise a budget.

How many people should I plan for?

Fewer than say yes in the group chat. GoHen’s 2025–26 research puts the typical hen group at 14, and every group shrinks somewhere between the enthusiasm and the balance payment. Our advice never changes: collect deposits before you confirm numbers with anyone, because enthusiasm is not money. Book the house for the number who have actually paid, not the number who reacted with a thumbs-up – a slightly smaller house that is genuinely full beats a grand one with empty bedrooms and a per-head cost that quietly crept up.

When is the best time to go?

The market has a rhythm: in our sister brand Butlers in the Buff's booking records, 56% of bookings fall between January and May, and December is the quietest month at just 2.9%. Read that backwards and you have your value play – autumn and early-winter weekends, when demand thins and owners have more room to negotiate. Midweek follows the same logic all year round: the same houses, far less competition, and roads that are empty on the drive up rather than clogged with everyone else's Friday commute.

What should I ask before I pay a deposit?

More than the listing tells you. Sleeping arrangements bed by bed, the damage deposit terms, whether the hot water copes with a full house of morning showers, and where the parking actually is relative to the front door. We keep a full list in our questions to ask before booking guide, and if the occasion is a hen do, start with our hen party houses page – it answers half of these before you ask.

How do I choose between a house and a hotel?

A house keeps the whole group in one place, which no hotel booking of separate rooms can do – breakfast, the late-night kitchen chat and the pre-dinner drinks all happen in the same space rather than scattered across floors. A hotel wins on zero admin: no deposit, no shopping, no washing up. Most larger groups find the house wins once they weigh in the cost of a hotel room apiece against one shared property, but it is worth pricing both for your actual dates before assuming either way. Our house versus hotel guide walks through the comparison properly.

What goes wrong most often, and how to avoid it

Almost every problem we hear about traces back to something that was never confirmed in writing – a bed count that turned out to include sofa beds, a deposit refund date nobody asked about, or a noise curfew the group only discovered from a neighbour at midnight. None of these are unusual house rules; they are simply the kind of detail that varies from owner to owner and needs asking about rather than assuming. Our group house etiquette guide and noise and neighbour guide cover the questions worth raising before you arrive, not after.

Who should be the one asking these questions?

Ideally, one person – not a rotating cast of whoever in the group chat feels like it that week. Owners respond better to a single point of contact who remembers what's already been asked and answered, and the group benefits from having one accurate version of the plan rather than three slightly different ones circulating. If the organiser and the money-handler are different people, as we'd generally recommend for larger groups, make sure whoever is fielding these questions has the authority to actually get answers acted on rather than just passing them along.

Turning good answers into a good booking

Getting clear answers to all of this is only useful if you actually act on them promptly. Large houses that answer your questions well are usually popular for the same reasons they answered well – a responsive, organised owner tends to run a well-organised house too. Once you've got satisfactory answers in writing, don't sit on the decision; the good ones don't stay available for long once a group starts asking the right questions.

Worth repeating: whatever your question, ask it before booking, in writing. The organisers who have smooth weekends are not the lucky ones; they are the ones with an email trail. Browse what's currently available on our properties page once you've got your questions ready.

Where these numbers come from

The booking figures in this article are our own, not an industry estimate. They come from the booking records of our sister brand Butlers in the Buff, which has been running group celebrations for more than twenty years and has served over 100,000 groups — so they describe what groups actually did, not what a survey says they intended to do. They are counts taken from those records rather than projections, and where we quote a share (for example the split of bookings across the year) it is a share of that whole dataset.

Two honest limits. It is one company’s book, weighted towards hen and stag celebrations, so it describes the celebration market rather than all UK group travel. And it is historical: it tells you how groups have behaved, which is a good guide to how they will behave, not a forecast. Anything from outside our own records is attributed in the sentence it appears in and linked below.

Sources

• GoHen — Hen Party Statistics 2025–2026 industry report
• Butlers in the Buff booking records — our sister brand’s own bookings, over 100,000 groups across more than 20 years of trading

Figures from our own booking records are counts, not estimates. Third-party figures are quoted as the original report gives them and linked above so you can check them. Last checked 4 September 2026.