What to Pack for a Hen Party Weekend: The Complete Packing List

After years of reading checkout feedback and post-weekend emails, I can tell you the two items hen groups most often wish they had packed: flip flops for the hot tub, and paracetamol. Not the fairy lights. Not the personalised tote bags. Flip flops and paracetamol.

That is the whole problem with hen party packing lists in miniature. The internet is full of them, and almost all of them are decoration inventories written by people selling decorations. This one is the opposite: what actually gets used across a weekend, what gets carried untouched from car to bedroom to car, and how to stop a group arriving with nine Bluetooth speakers and no corkscrew.

The things that actually get used

The honest personal list is short, and most of it is unglamorous.

• A warm layer for outside. British evenings do not care that it is June, and the garden is where the weekend lives. The person in a strappy dress at 10pm is the person who goes to bed at 10.15.
• Swimwear. Pack it even if nobody has mentioned a hot tub. There is very often a hot tub, and the alternative is negotiating for spare shorts.
• Comfortable shoes. For the walk to the pub, the gravel drive, and the bit of the weekend nobody photographed.
• An eye mask and ear plugs. If you are sharing a twin room you will thank yourself. Someone in the group snores; that is simply arithmetic.
• More phone chargers than feels reasonable. Nobody in recorded history has regretted a spare charger. Bring a cheap one you are willing to lose, because one always stays behind in a big house.
• Your own painkillers. Do not rely on the MOH’s supply lasting the whole group two nights.

If the weekend has a proper night out planned — and Brighton is the classic case, the most-booked destination in Butlers in the Buff’s records with 2,100+ bookings — add the going-out outfit. One, not four. You will wear one.

Pack for the house you are actually going to

Most packing lists are written as if every hen weekend happens in the same building. They do not, and the type of house changes the list more than the destination does.

A rural country house means gravel, mud, cold stone floors and a walk to the nearest anything. Pack slippers, flat shoes and a coat. Leave the heels. Also assume patchy mobile signal, which means downloading playlists, maps and your booking confirmation before you set off rather than at the gate.

A city or coastal house flips it: less kit, more outfit, and taxis rather than a convoy. Here the shared-kit problem is smaller because a shop is five minutes away.

Any house with a hot tub or pool adds its own list — swimwear, flip flops, a towelling robe or a large towel of your own, and a hair tie. Glass is not permitted in most hot tubs, so plastic flutes belong on the shared list, not in individual bags. Our hot tub group houses guide covers what else is worth establishing about the tub before you arrive.

The broader point: read the listing before you pack, and if something matters, ask. What a house provides — bedding, towels, kitchen equipment, whether the hot tub is included or carries an extra charge — is set individually by each owner and varies far more than groups expect. Our questions to ask before booking a group house guide is the list to work through before anyone starts packing.

The shared kit, done once

This is where hen weekends waste the most money and bag space. Without a shared kit list, a group generates a speaker per person, several packs of cards and zero corkscrews.

Make one list, assign each item to a named person, and post it in the group chat. One speaker. One first-aid kit. One deck of cards. One person on decorations, one on games, one on the playlist. That is it.

With the average UK hen do running £203 per person before food, travel and extras (GoHen, 2025–26), duplicated kit is money the group has already committed elsewhere — and it is money better spent on the parts of the weekend people remember. Our guide to splitting hen weekend costs covers how to handle the shared spend without anyone feeling stung, and the hen party house price guide puts the accommodation side in context.

The MOH’s bag is a different bag

If you are running the weekend, you carry a second, unglamorous kit that nobody else needs to know about until the moment they do.

Printed copies of every booking confirmation, with the property address, the owner’s contact number and arrival instructions — printed, because rural signal fails at exactly the wrong moment. Paracetamol, plasters, blister pads, safety pins, hair grips, a stain remover pen. A portable power bank. Some cash, because one taxi or one honesty-box farm shop will need it. A spare phone charger. And a list of who has paid what, so the money conversation never has to happen from memory.

Add one thing most organisers forget: a note of any dietary requirements and allergies in the group, and any relevant medical information the group is comfortable sharing. It weighs nothing and matters enormously on the one weekend it comes up.

The full run-through of what to organise, as opposed to what to pack, lives in our hen party planning checklist.

Entertainment: pack light, book one thing

Games travel badly. The ones that work in a house need no printing, no laminating and no explaining twice — a deck of cards, a quiz about the bride written on the drive up, one dare game. Our hen party games piece has the ones that survive contact with a real group.

What genuinely lifts a weekend is one booked thing rather than four half-arranged ones, and the booked thing needs nothing packed. A cocktail masterclass or a life drawing session arrives complete with everything it needs, which is precisely why they work: nobody has to remember anything. Whether outside suppliers are permitted at a property is the owner’s decision and worth confirming before booking.

What to leave at home

Heels, for a countryside house with a gravel drive. Anything requiring an iron. The fourth outfit option. Full-size toiletries when three people have already brought shampoo. Anything glass that is going anywhere near a hot tub.

And, controversially, the giant inflatable. It takes the best part of an hour to blow up, features in two photographs, and then spends the rest of the weekend dying slowly in a corner of the lounge. If somebody insists, make it their job to deflate and remove it — that alone settles most of these debates.

Confetti deserves a specific mention: check before you bring it. Some owners prohibit it outright, some charge for cleaning, and it is entirely their call — find out rather than find out afterwards.

Assign the shared kit to two named people, not the group chat. “Someone bring a speaker” means nobody brings a speaker. “Sarah brings the speaker, Amy brings the chargers and the paracetamol” means the weekend works. If you are still choosing where all this is going, start with our hen party houses.

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.