Collaborative post
Hotel rooms are fine for a weekend away on your own, but they fall apart fast once you’re travelling as a group. Someone’s always down the corridor, breakfast is a queue, and by 9pm everyone’s retreated to their own four walls instead of actually spending time together.
It’s part of why whole-house bookings have quietly become one of the most popular ways for families to holiday together. Rather than splitting across multiple hotel rooms or a scatter of Airbnbs, everyone, grandparents, cousins, the lot, is under one roof, with a kitchen to cook in, a garden to spill out into, and a living room big enough for everyone to actually be in the same place at the same time.
The numbers back it up: group getaways are now one of the fastest-growing reasons people book a house together, with the typical group running 8 to 12 people and spending somewhere between £2,500 and £5,000 on a long weekend once you split it between families. That works out cheaper per person than a hotel, once you factor in that everyone’s sharing a kitchen instead of eating out three times a day.
If you’re planning a multi-family trip, a few things are worth checking before you book: does the house actually sleep everyone comfortably (rather than squeezing in sofa beds to hit the number), is there enough shared space for a group that size, and can you book directly with the owner rather than through a platform charging a booking fee on top.
Sites like Group Escape Houses are a good place to start if you want to browse specifically for large group accommodation rather than wading through standard holiday-let listings, everything’s filtered for the kind of numbers a family reunion actually needs.
Perhaps you’re planning a multi-generational holiday to celebrate a milestone birthday or anniversary. Or perhaps it’s your summer holiday and you want to take the grandparents too so they can spend time with the grandchildren, you might even get a bit of babysitting built into your holiday.
Whatever the occasion, group family holidays can work really well in a large self-catering house. Just make sure you consider who will be doing the cooking etc so everyone can enjoy the holiday and not feel like they are the only one contributing to the chores!