Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images
There are endless opportunities for a group trip to go off the rails, and, unfortunately, it can happen quite often thanks to the chaos and personality clashes that come with traveling in numbers. Group trips test your friendships, your patience, and your sanity, and sometimes you end up returning with even more baggage than you left with.
Below, seven people tell us the good, the bad, and the really ugly stories from their big trips. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
I was on a bachelorette trip in Fort Lauderdale with a group of 14 girls. Everything was going great until the last night of the trip. We went on a boat and then we were all hanging around at the pool at our Airbnb, and at around 6 p.m., I started feeling sick. I thought I was out in the sun for too long and maybe was drinking too much, so I went upstairs and threw up, which was terrible. I thought I was going to feel better, and then I didn’t and kept throwing up. It turns out I had a norovirus.
Pretty much every hour on the hour, another girl would fall ill. We had a private chef come in that was cooking us dinner, and some girls were able to get the food down, but then they obviously started feeling sick too. It went on like this all night. The bride-to-be got hit with it, I think, at 3 a.m. It was like that movie Bridesmaids, we were so down bad. We had to DoorDash some toilet paper and some Pedialite because the girls were so dehydrated. There were only three bathrooms in our Airbnb and we were doing the best to share, but some girls were throwing up in the sink or throwing up in garbage cans and sleeping on the floor of the bathroom.
I pretty much stopped throwing up at, like, midnight or 1 a.m., but that’s when some of the other girls started. Some girls fell ill on the flight and were in the bathroom or throwing up into the puke bags on the plane. My roommate on the trip apparently always pees when she throws up, and she kept peeing her pants. There were three girls who didn’t get sick and they quarantined themselves in a separate room. I don’t blame them; I would’ve done the same thing.
My TV-station colleagues and I won an award and were invited to New York City for the ceremony. I was told that I could invite people, so I reached out to two of my close friends at the time, one of whom I had known for decades and another I had known for about six years. After I invited them, there was a romantic moment between them. I wasn’t entirely sure the extent of it, and I had asked if they had talked about it. I said to my friend A. that if they want space to figure out what’s going on, I’d be more than happy to get my own hotel room, and if they didn’t want to go, I’d understand. A. said it was nothing and that they didn’t like each other. We get to New York and right off the bat, it was not good. The best way I can describe it was like being around two horny teenagers. It was just hell from the beginning. The first night, they both went and got dinner without me. We also got in a fight over whether or not we needed tickets to the Museum of Natural History, and then they both went off on their own, so I spent the next five hours by myself in the museum.
The next day, the day of the gala, I was feeling sick, so they ended up going and doing things by themselves. They got back to the hotel late, and we were almost late to the gala, so I was a little on edge. We get there and I’m having a fairly good time with my co-workers and not really paying attention to them, so I didn’t realize that they were getting drunk. It was an open bar, and by the time we sat down for dinner, they were plastered. They were cheering and yelling in a way that I can only describe as obscene. I was mortified. At one point, A. spilled a whole cocktail on me and broke the cocktail glass on me. My co-worker helped me, and we came back, and they kept sneaking off to go make out in the corner.
We left the gala with my co-workers who wanted to go to a rooftop bar. I’m sitting in an Uber with two of my co-workers, and my friends start going at it in the back seat. When we get to the next location, we all get out and I confront them, and I’m like, “What are you doing?” B. got so angry and he ended up screaming “fuck you” at me. I stayed out, and they went back to the hotel.
It was well after midnight, and I got to the hotel room and everything was gone. They took all of their things and went somewhere. I tried calling them, and they didn’t answer me. I changed my flight back home to leave a day earlier than we had planned. I had also paid for everything at this point, the flights and the hotel. The next day, I flew back to Colorado and never spoke to them again.
When I was in college in 2016, my friends and I decided to go to the HARD Summer music festival in L.A. A couple of our guy friends convinced us to stay at an Airbnb they rented since it had multiple rooms and a pool. When we arrived, there was a family fully squatting in the house, and they told us we could only use part of the house. There was no toilet paper or hand soap or anything you would expect at an Airbnb. There also was no furniture except for a couch in the main living room, which the family said was theirs. We were in college at the time and had basically spent all of our money on this place, plus there was, like, ten of us staying there, so we decided to try to make the most of it the first night.
There was tension in the group initially, like, How did you not know that this was a scam? One of the guys in our group ran to a store to grab air mattresses and basic essentials, and we decided to lock all of our stuff in our cars and head to the festival. When we got back, the family told us we weren’t allowed to use the pool, and we woke up to one of the kids standing in our room staring at us. We all found alternative places to sleep that next night but left our cars parked at the house. When we got back the next morning, the cops were there and, essentially, this family had been squatting inside the whole time. The guys who booked the house reached out to Airbnb, but they weren’t able to get our money back. But we were all happy to be out of that situation. We’re mostly all still friends.
Two years ago, I went to Europe in the fall with a group of my friends. It was me and three other people. Leading up to the trip the summer before, one of my friends and I started hooking up, and that set off another friend, H., in the group; she was very anti-us getting together. Pre-trip, we had a discussion that it wasn’t romantic anymore and that was fine, but of course when you’re young and you’re in Europe, you want to be able to kiss someone in the club and have fun. There was one night in the club when my friend and I started making out, and H grabbed us and physically pulled us apart from each other. It was not her first time doing it, but it really struck a nerve with me at that moment because she had a serious boyfriend of two years and she was making out with other guys all night at the club, and I just thought, like, What a hypocrite. We had gone on a trip prior where she had cheated on her boyfriend there, too. I was so upset. I left the club with my friend and the other girl in our group, M., who H. started attacking and saying nasty things to. The rest of the trip was really awkward. She never apologized or talked about it; it was just this lingering tension in the air, and we were halfway through the trip when this happened.
When we got back, we made it super-clear to her how we felt. She then came at us as though we were not friends with her because of an element of bigotry and we were not supportive of her identity. We stopped being friends, and she told our mutual friends that our bigotry was the reason we were no longer speaking to her. That was the dissolution of that friend group, but I’m still friends with M.
My best friend’s bachelorette trip to the Hamptons was two years ago in April, and I went with a group of ten other girls. Leading up to it, we decided that we were going to book a private chef about a month out. They were so communicative; they sent us menus, they sent us options, and they were so on top of it, asking if there were dietary restrictions. We solidified an entire menu and we were all so excited. We set up a table, we did everything, and literally an hour before, they were like, “Oh, the chef can’t make it.” We had paid around $200 to $300 each for this chef. We asked for our money back and got ghosted — they just pocketed the $1,500 they got from Venmo. My friend’s sister booked the chef, and after the fact, I started doing some deep diving and found that they had shitty reviews and apparently they’ve done this before, or when they did show up, it was totally trash food. [People] tried to get their money back, but it didn’t work out.
I was like, “Okay, let’s just go to the grocery store or something and get a bunch of appetizers and we’ll cook and whatever.” One of the other girls suggested we go to dinner, so then we ended up going to dinner. They ordered the seafood towers, they did the whole nine yards, and it ended up being between $200 and $300 more a person. It was essentially a $500 night. I probably spent around $3,000 to $4,000 on the entire weekend. There was a lot of chatter afterward about the expensive dinner that we went to.
It was my birthday trip to Mexico City, and I was going with my best friend from college, one of my best friends from D.C., and a newer friend. We had some other friends who were already going to be there, and we had plans to meet up with them. The first day was great. My D.C. friend and I had a great day; we were eating street tacos and shopping around — it was amazing. Then, a couple days before my birthday, everyone started trickling in for the festivities. I felt like I was on top of the world.
On my actual birthday, I woke up in the morning and was like, This is the best day of my life. My D.C. friend said she was starting to feel a little sick, but I thought nothing could stop us. My best friend from college arrives and we pick him up from the airport and head to a beautiful lunch. Five minutes before we got there, I received a call from the front desk at my building telling me that my apartment had flooded and that everything from my kitchen to my living room was ruined. They said they’d fix what they could. At this point, I still have five more days left on the trip. I tried to let it go, but I was stressed all day about it. The next day, I started not feeling too well — I guess I ate one too many street tacos, because I felt violently ill. So, I’m sick with a stomach bug and my best friend is deathly ill with what we think was COVID. I had made all these reservations on my actual birthday for places I had been dying to go to, and I essentially had a miniature bite out of everything and had to watch everyone else eat all the food because I couldn’t stomach it. I was so upset. The next day, I bought Imodium and I pounded that and tequila shots and we went to the Lucha Libre fights. It was so painful to watch everyone living my dream, eating all the food that I really, really wanted to eat that I had booked this trip specifically for. And it was hot as balls.
Everything in my apartment was ruined when I got back. I came home to half the floors in my living room and kitchen pulled up and 16 industrial fans on. It took four months to get my apartment situated when I got back. It happened on May 2, and I didn’t move back in until August. That was the birthday trip from hell.
My friend who didn’t get sick was over us. He was traumatized.
When I was 24, I last-minute agreed to go on a Fourth of July trip with a girl who was a good friend of mine from a previous internship we had together. She put together this whole trip and told me she had booked an Airbnb in a cute little beach town not too far from the Hamptons. I didn’t have plans, so I was like, Yeah, sure, I’ll come. I didn’t ask a lot about it. I knew she was kind of bougie, as am I, so I had so much confidence that she would do a good job organizing the whole thing. She invited a couple of her friends who I didn’t know, and I invited one of my friends. She picked us up in a rental car, and we were all very hyped on our way there. We stopped at Target, did the obligatory beach-weekend shop, and bought a bunch of snacks and booze. But then we arrived, and the town itself was in the middle of nowhere. I don’t even remember what it was called. It was not close to the beach, even though she framed it like we were going to a cute beach town with all of these bars and we’d be going to the beach every day. Nope. The beach was 45 minutes away and there were no bars, only a sketchy hookah bar.
The Airbnb was truly disgusting. I don’t even know how it was technically considered an Airbnb, it was that gross. There was mouse shit everywhere, including on the bedspread, on our pillows. It barely looked like it was standing. The lights were flickering, and there were bars on the windows of the bathroom and mold. I was freaking out, trying to figure out a way out of this situation. We couldn’t really get a convenient train, and I was genuinely worried I would upset her because she seemed very stressed when we got there. I don’t know how she booked this place, unless it was a complete catfish.
I thought we’d laugh about it and trauma bond, but it got more awkward. My friend who was in charge took such a large amount of Xanax that she was xanned out the whole time. At first we didn’t really know what was going on. I didn’t even know she had Xanax with her. She was barely conscious. We ended up going to dinner, and her eyes were closing at the table. I had never seen her like that before. The other two girls were very shy, and it was the most awkward trip ever.
She never apologized and never owned up to the fact that she was so fucked up on Xanax the whole time, even though it was so obvious. We stayed friends for a little while after that, but now we are no longer friends.
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