SOCIETY PLANNING
"Right, where are we going this year?" Six words. Said in the group chat. By someone who absolutely will not be the one sorting it.
If you're reading this, you're the one who sorts it. Nobody elected you. There was no ceremony. You just happened to be the organised one and now, year after year, that's your identity within the society whether you like it or not. The good news is there's a better way to do this than the spreadsheet-and-browser-tabs approach most people are still using.
The number one mistake is picking a destination and then trying to make everyone fit around it. Go the other way. Before you mention a single place, find out who's actually coming, what they're willing to spend, and where they're flying from. Sixteen people rarely all live in the same place — you'll have a London contingent, a Manchester lot, and the one bloke who drives from somewhere near Inverness and considers that perfectly reasonable.
Once you know the budget range and the airports, the shortlist mostly sorts itself. This sounds obvious but it's the step most organisers skip, which is why they end up three weeks into planning discovering that four people can't actually afford what they'd already half-agreed to.
"Shall we do Portugal?" produces thumbs up emojis and no decisions. "Here are Budget, Mid-Range and Luxury versions of an Algarve trip — which works for the group?" produces actual answers. People vote for specifics. They can't vote for a vague idea. Get three real options in front of them with actual courses and actual hotels named, and the conversation moves forward instead of going in circles for three weeks.
Group chats are where decisions go to quietly expire. Set a hard deadline for votes — "reply by Sunday or I'm assuming you're flexible" — and stick to it. The people who miss the deadline and then have strong opinions afterwards are a known phenomenon and you are within your rights to ignore them.
Book the things that get more expensive the longer you leave them. Tee times can usually be sorted closer to the date. Restaurants definitely can. But a flight that was £89 in November is £189 in January and sold out in March. Lock in the accommodation and flights, then work outward from there.
The organiser fronting four grand on a personal card and chasing people via WhatsApp for the next two months is one of those experiences that everyone laughs about afterwards and nobody wants to repeat. Get deposits before you book anything you can't cancel. The people who say "I'll sort you after payday" mean it entirely sincerely and will still owe you money at the airport.
This exact process — the airport juggling, the three-tier comparisons, the voting that never quite happens, the chasing people for deposits — was taking up entire weekends. Twice a year, every year. GolfTrip does the research in about sixty seconds, the group voting happens in the app instead of a buried thread, and everyone can see the same information instead of fifteen slightly different versions of what's been decided. It won't stop someone changing their mind about flights for the fourth time. Nothing can fix that. But it cuts the rest of it down considerably.
Stop herding sheep with opinions about green fees.