Group Holiday Trends 2026: What UK Travellers Are Searching for This Year

Most 2026 trend pieces are guesswork dressed up in stock photography. We’d rather show you booking data. Butlers in the Buff’s records – 100,000+ groups over 20 years – plus what we see on our own changeover days point to five shifts worth planning around.

1. The classy-hen shift is now the mainstream

The clearest line in the data: the classic butler booking has steadily lost ground while do-it-together experiences took its place. Life drawing grew 149% between 2017 and its 2022 peak in Butlers in the Buff’s records, and the brand now hosts roughly 120 cocktail classes with a host a year. Groups haven’t gone quiet; they’ve gone curated. The shared thread across every rising activity is that everyone does it together, in the same room, at the same time – the opposite of a bar crawl, which splits a big group into four separate conversations within the hour.

2. Everything comes to the house now

The common thread in those rising activities is the venue: your own kitchen, your own lounge. A group big enough to need a house is exactly the size that restaurants and day spas handle badly – split sittings, two tables, half the party in a different room – and that a big house handles beautifully. In 2026 the house is not where you sleep between activities – it is the activity. That has knock-on effects on what organisers actually look for in a listing: a dining table that seats the whole group, a kitchen with enough worktop for a private chef to work in, and a living space big enough for everyone to sit down at once are now higher up the checklist than they were five years ago.

3. January is the new booking season

The market has a heartbeat: in Butlers in the Buff's booking records, 56% of bookings land between January and May, and December is the quietest month at 2.9%. Median lead time in those same records is 82 days – under three months, which is why so many organisers arrive to find the house they wanted already taken. If you want a summer Saturday in 2026, the people you are competing with started looking in the first weeks of January. The organisers who move fastest tend to be the ones who lock a date over the Christmas break, before the group chat has even properly reconvened for the new year.

4. The UK holds its ground

GoHen’s 2025–26 research shows 66% of hen weekends staying in the UK, with the average hen do at £203 per person – typically two nights with multiple activities included. The destination league table barely moves: in Butlers in the Buff’s booking records Brighton leads on 2,100+ bookings, then Liverpool, London, Bath and Manchester. Meanwhile average self-catering occupancy in Scotland was just 41.6% across 2024 (VisitScotland’s occupancy survey), and midweek and off-season nights are the quiet ones across the market – which means outside those honeypot dates, there is more empty supply than the headlines suggest, and room to negotiate. A UK weekend also removes an entire category of planning risk – flight delays, lost luggage, currency – that a big group genuinely does not need on top of everything else.

5. Groups are asking harder questions before they book

The other change we notice, less quantifiable but just as real, is that organisers arrive better prepared than they used to. They ask about bed configuration bed by bed, they ask what the damage deposit covers, and they ask whether the group can bring a dog before they fall in love with a listing. That is a healthy shift – the weekends that go smoothly are consistently the ones where the questions were asked in week one rather than discovered on arrival. Our questions to ask before booking guide and large house booking checklist are written for exactly that more careful kind of organiser.

If a hen do is what brought you here, our hen party houses collection is built around exactly these shifts, and our multi-generational group holidays guide covers the family-reunion side of the same trend.

What this means for how you plan your own weekend

None of these shifts require a group to do anything radically different – they mostly reward planning slightly earlier and being more specific about what the weekend is actually for. A group that decides early whether this is a wellness weekend, a party weekend or a family gathering, and books a house and activities that suit that one purpose, consistently reports a better trip than one that tries to keep every option open until the last minute. The trend data is really just a record of what worked for other groups; the useful move is applying the same discipline to your own.

Where to start if you're planning around these trends

Begin with the occasion and the shape of the day, not the destination. Once you know whether the weekend centres on an at-house activity, a wellness pace, or a night out, the right region and the right house follow much more easily. Our special celebrations collection and group holiday organising checklist are both good starting points once you've settled on that. It's also worth revisiting this list a year from now rather than treating it as fixed – the underlying driver behind all of it is groups wanting genuine time together rather than a schedule of separate activities, and that preference isn't likely to reverse even as the specific trends move on.

The practical takeaway: pick one trend and commit. The weekends that fall flat try to be a spa retreat, a cocktail bar and a walking holiday at once. The ones people talk about for years do one thing properly.

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
• VisitScotland — Scottish Accommodation Occupancy Survey (Scotland only)
• 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.