A creative way to pick your next vacation spot with a large group.
Every few years, our extended family (my wife Lauren and I and our 4 kids, my parents, my siblings and their kids) all go on a vacation together to a new destination. It all started about 12 years ago with London (which we had to miss out on due to our daughter being only 2 months old!), and we’ve since traveled to Paris, went on a Mediterranean cruise, enjoyed Hawaii very very much, and are heading to Italy in the Summer of 2026. Choosing the destination has not really had a formal process. Usually prompted by my Dad, we just kind of all talk about it when we happen to be together for holidays or whenever else, collect some general thoughts and ideas, and pretty much everyone has agreed from trip to trip on where to go.
For our 2026 trip, my Dad decided to use a bit of a different selection method. It worked so well and created some real excitement in the planning process that it’s worth sharing.
📝Make a List
With a few of these trips under our belts already, we all had somewhat varying ideas of where to go next. We ended up with a list of 7 different potential trips (in no particular order)
Alaskan Cruise
Greece
Germany
Scotland
Italy (Rome specifically)
Western Canada
Switzerland
📜Set the Rules
The rules were that each household got to rank the 7 potential destinations in order of most excited about to least excited about, giving each trip a ranking from 1 to 7. Yes, I said each “household” got to submit a single ranking, and yes, that caused a lot of “discussion” among the six members of my immediate family. But the more we talked about the list, the more we realized there was not really a “least excited”, there were just trips that kinds of captured our attention a bit more than others.
On the honor system, the households were not supposed to disclose their rankings to the other households. We had 5 total households submitting rankings, and my Dad set a deadline for when rankings had to be submitted (we used Thanksgiving 2024 as the cutoff). All rankings were submitted only to my Dad, so we did not know what anyone else’s rankings were.
💻Total the Points
With the rankings submitted, my Dad then assigned points to each of the rankings. A top ranking got 7 points, second place got 6 points and so on down to the seventh ranked destination getting 1 point. He did that for each set of ranking submitted and then totaled all the points for each destination. The destination with the most points wins!
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If you want to try this method out, you can head to the Resources section of our website and download the rankings spreadsheet for free!
💥Reveal the Winner
Except he couldn’t just have it be THAT simple. Even though he had all the rankings and totaled all the points, he wasn’t going to reveal the winner without a little build up. So, in the few weeks between Thanksgiving (when the households submitted their rankings) and Christmas (when we would all be together again), each Sunday he would send a group text letting us all known which destination had been “voted off the island.”
We ended up with 4 remaining potential destinations by Christmas when the ultimate winner was revealed—-ITALY!
🌍Use the Momentum to Start Planning the Trip
Was this process necessary? No. Was it a little bit of work for my Dad? Yes. Did it generate a bunch of discussion and some build up/excitement? Absolutely. We spent a good bit of our 2024 Holiday discussing possibilities for Italy and all having a good laugh about each family’s ranking “process.”
So if you are looking for a way to spice up vacation selection, feel free to steal my Dad’s idea and have some fun with it!
