Friendship and Travel... Choose Wisely

Your Girlfriend Next Door Podcast

Always choose your travel buddy wisely. Girl.... this could make or break a friendship. Not understanding or choosing the wright personality could be detrimental to any relationship. Let's chat about it!

Per The Washington Post-In theory, a vacation with close friends — known as a friendcation — sounds like a great idea. But while you might enjoy someone’s company over dinner, on the tennis court or while cheering on children from the soccer sidelines, a getaway with the same person or people could be a recipe for disaster. Interests, the goal of the trip, budgets and tolerance for togetherness all factor into the outcome.

Friendcations are on the rise in the experience of Krishnan Menon, founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based marketing company Phenomenon, and several other travel specialists contacted for this story. Menon believes the trips’ popularity is driven, in part, by social media. Groups post images and stories of trips with friends, and others “then want to recreate those moments with their own friend groups or use them as a mechanism for reconnection with distant friends,” he says.

But while there’s a lot of potential for things to go awry on friendcations, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be done. Here are nine tips on how to have a friendcation that’s memorable for all the right reasons.

Talk honestly before even agreeing to vacation together. This is key so that you can get a better understanding of each other's travel style and decide whether it makes sense to take the trip in the first place, says Roberta Long-Kelleher, a travel consultant with Protravel International in New York, who has planned dozens of trips for groups of friends.