We studied 1,840 group trips. The bottleneck is never the flights.

If you ask people why their last group trip almost did not happen, they will say "flights." They will say "schedules." They will, occasionally and with feeling, say "Dave."

When we looked at the actual data — 1,840 trips planned through MyPerfectStay between August 2025 and April 2026 — the most common bottleneck was none of these. It was the gap between "we should go somewhere" and "these are the dates."

That gap, on average, is 19 days.

The four failure modes

Trips that died before booking died in one of four ways. We expected the distribution to be roughly even. It was not.

1. Date drift — 47% of failed trips. Group cannot agree on dates within four weeks of the original suggestion.
2. Destination ambiguity — 24%. The group narrows to two cities and then politely never picks one.
3. Budget mismatch — 18%. Discovered late, usually after a hotel has been suggested.
4. The default-planner exit — 11%. The person doing the work loses interest, and no one else picks it up.

The flights, you will notice, are not in the list. By the time a group is shopping for flights, the trip is already happening.

The 19-day window

The most useful number in the dataset is the median time between the first message in a group chat and the first booking. For groups that successfully take a trip, that number is 19 days. For groups that never take the trip, the gap is larger — much larger — and the conversation tends to die out around day 32.

We now show this number, gently, inside the app. Groups that have been planning for more than 32 days without locking dates get a small nudge. About a third of them respond by picking dates within a week.

What this tells us

The bottleneck in group travel is not logistics. It is commitment. Groups stall at the moment a decision becomes irreversible — picking dates, paying a deposit, sending the invite to the friend who has not replied yet.

The right tool does not optimise the booking flow. It compresses the gap between we should and we did. Everything else, including the flights, follows.

Coming soon

We are publishing the full dataset (anonymised) and the methodology in May. If you run a tour operator, hotel group, or destination marketing organisation and want a custom cut, get in touch.