How to Plan a Girls Trip to the Beach: A Real Group Chat's Planning Process

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There are two undeniable truths in life: Your three-person group chat has a super stupid name, and you all never see each other. Here's how we got our trio out of the group chat and planned a girls' beach trip.

The following is the story of three high-school besties who managed to stay in touch through college, post-graduate degrees, medical residency and full-time jobs, and have only seen each other once a year for the last 10+ years. You see, when you have two friends in med school and you work full time, getting together isn't exactly convenient, and while the three of us have made great efforts to see each other at least once a year, we've somehow never actually been to a destination together (that isn't someone else's apartment).

This is the tale of how our beach trip made it out of iMessage and into an AirBnB on the Florida coast, including how we chose our destination (it's wildly uninteresting), how we planned the girls trip start to finish, and the exact tools I use to book stays, flights, cars, and experiences.

Step 1: The Girls Trip Group Survey

If you think I'm kidding, I'm not. The best way to mobilize a group of workaholic, over-achieving, former-gifted children is to make a Google Form. So that's exactly what I did.

If you're not familiar with Google Forms, it's a great way to gather information survey-style and push results directly into a spreadsheet. I've been using it for years, whether it's for teaching (what time should we have a Zoom review session?) to having people visit (Do you need a tour guide? Or do you just want a place to crash?).

I put together a quick Google Form that we were all able to fill out, without the pressure of seeing each other's answers and catering to everyone else's preferences. A few of the fields included:

• Availability

• How far we were willing to travel

• Budget

• Vibes

• Dealbreakers

While the above is by no means an exhaustive list, it's a place to get you started. Ultimately, we landed on a general type of trip and budget we were all comfortable with, which allowed us to narrow down locations. Knowing our ideal trip was a low-key, relaxing beach trip, we chose a destination based on where our trio-member based in Denver could afford to fly, and that's how we landed on — drumroll please — Jacksonville Beach, Florida.

Step 2: Book the Girls Trip

As the frequent flyer in our group (by that, I mean general traveler), we agreed I'd do the heavy lifting on finding a place to stay. Knowing our dates and location, I put together a list on AirBnB and shared it with the group. I say this with so much pain, because I really do prefer VRBO because I like to think I'm not a bad person — but AirBnB has this great feature where you can share a list with other AirBnB users, and you all can vote and comment on the places you've saved. Based on our votes, I put together a Top 3 list with pros and cons for each booking, and we all agreed on our best option.

From there, we all booked our flights separately, and we decided unanimously we'd need a rental car. In that case, the girls handed responsibility to me, knowing I'd run a final price by everyone before booking anything.

Step 3: Build the Itinerary

We may have booked a place to stay and scheduled our flights, but the trip isn't really planned until you've had a crisis about what you need to pack, and to pack effectively, an itinerary does help.

Now, I'm not usually the "plan every minute" type of gal, but I've mentioned how I like to plan my non-negotiables and leave room for flexibility around them. Using our original survey, I put together a loose itinerary for the trip in a shared note, and we scheduled time to go over it and select which days would be best for activities we had to reserve or schedule. Then, we online shopped together — just girlie things.

The Tools We Used to Book

The nice thing about this particular trio is that the three of us (despite how type A we are in our professional lives), are really just in it for the vibes when we get together, so there was no need to account for conflicting opinions or disagreements. That said, there are a few tools that made this whole experience much easier:

• Kayak: Using Kayak's Explore tool, we were able to see several locations to determine what would be within budget for our friend in Denver, which allowed us to pick a destination quickly. Then, we were able to compare flights from our respective take-off points to plan similar arrival times. I booked the rental car with Kayak, too — it's the one travel-planning tool I will live and die by.

  
  

  

  
  

• AirBnB: As mentioned above, AirBnB does have a great feature that allows you to vote on places in a shared list before you book. It definitely helps democratize the process, without having to drop a bunch of links in one place.

  
  

• Google Forms: I truly believe if we hadn't been able to collect this info from all three of us in one place, we never would have made it. Want a copy of the survey I created? Get it here.

  
  

• ResortPass: We knew early on that we'd like to have a pool day if we could find a way to make it worth our time and expense. Thanks to ResortPass, we were able to book a room at the Hilton for the day, which gave us access to the pool, a private bathroom with a shower, and a discount on food and drink all day.

  
  

• Splitwise: Splitwise is a life saver for group trips and expenses. Splitwise allows you to tally up who has spent how much on what (that was fun to type!), and it calculates who owes who (and how much) once all of the transactions have been added. This prevents anyone from overspending (if you're the one who has hotels and cars sitting on a credit card), but it eliminates the need for 100 different Venmo transactions. I don't like to nickle and dime my friends, so Splitwise makes it easier to keep track of things when everyone is making large transactions.

  
  

Lessons Learned

This was my first foray into taking responsibility for planning a girls trip for myself and friends — in the past, it's been a whole mess of scheduling conflicts, last-minute booking, and stress, but I can confidently say this time around, things felt easy.

Obviously as groups get larger, it becomes harder to accommodate everyone's preferences, but having started with an easy information-gathering method, I know that's the way I'll be planning group trips in the future. The stars align for our trio so rarely, so we had no time to waste on the back-and-forth. And wouldn't you know — the trip went off (almost) without a hitch.

Stay tuned for the destination review, and if you're packing for a group trip yourself, don't forget to grab my Master Packing List.