Friends Won't Respond About the Trip? Here's How to Fix That

You text the group: "Hey! When is everyone free for the trip?" You get a thumbs-up react from one person. Two friends respond immediately with dates. Then silence. For days.

You follow up. "Hey just bumping this, need everyone's dates!" One more trickle-in response. Still missing half the group. A week goes by and now the early responders are getting annoyed, the non-responders feel guilty, and you're sitting there wondering why you volunteered to plan this thing in the first place.

If this sounds familiar, congratulations. You're a trip organizer. And the non-response problem is the single most universal pain point in group travel planning. I've dealt with it on literally every trip I've ever organized.

The good news: your friends aren't ignoring you because they don't care. They're ignoring you because you're accidentally making it really hard to respond.

The question is the problem

"When are you free this summer?" is a terrible question. Not because it's the wrong thing to ask, but because answering it requires someone to open their calendar, scan through three months of commitments, mentally cross-reference work deadlines and that wedding they might have, and compose a coherent reply. That's fifteen minutes of work, minimum.

So they think "I'll do that later" and then they never do. Because later never comes when it's a low-urgency text in a group chat with 47 unread messages.

The fix is stupid simple: make the question easier to answer. Instead of asking when people are free, give them options. "Can you do Aug 15-20 or Aug 22-27?" requires about ten seconds of thought. Someone can answer that while standing in line at the grocery store. Open-ended availability questions require a desk, a calendar, and uninterrupted focus. Things most adults have in short supply.

Get out of the group chat

I cannot stress this enough. The group chat is sabotaging your planning.

You send the availability question. Two people respond. Then someone sends a meme. Someone else starts a side conversation about a totally different topic. Your availability question is now twelve screens up and functionally invisible. The people who haven't responded yet will never scroll back to find it.

When we were planning the Lisbon trip last spring, I watched my friend Priya's very reasonable question about airport transportation get buried under forty messages about whether we should do a day trip to Sintra. She finally just texted everyone individually. Took her twenty minutes but she had answers within the hour.

Send the ask separately. A direct message to each person, or better yet, a link to something they can fill out on their own time. Doesn't matter what the tool is. A Google Form, a poll, something like Juntos where people can submit their dates in about thirty seconds. The point is that it's a standalone ask, not something buried in the noise.

Direct messages have dramatically better response rates than group messages. When someone gets a text that says "hey, can you fill this out for the trip? takes 30 seconds" they feel personally asked. When they see the same request in a group of twelve, they assume someone else will respond first and they'll get to it later.

Deadlines change everything

"I need everyone's dates by Friday. If I haven't heard from you by then, I'm booking based on whoever did respond."

That's it. No guilt trip, no passive aggression. Just a clear boundary.

I used to be polite about it. "Whenever you get a chance!" "No rush, just let me know!" This approach has a 100% failure rate. People are weirdly good at meeting deadlines and weirdly bad at doing things with no deadline. So give them a deadline.

And yes, follow through. If someone doesn't respond by the deadline, plan without their input. They'll either speak up fast when they realize plans are moving forward, or they'll be fine with whatever the group picks. Either way, you're not stuck waiting anymore.

Ask something they actually want to answer

Instead of only asking logistical questions ("when are you free?" / "what's your budget?"), ask something people are excited to answer.

I ask everyone in the group to name their #1 Thing, the one activity or experience they absolutely have to do on the trip. Not a list, not "whatever everyone else wants." One thing that's non-negotiable for them.

People love answering this question. It's fun. It lets them daydream about the trip instead of doing calendar math. And suddenly the person who ghosted your availability text is blowing up the chat with "I HAVE to do the cliff jumping tour, I've been watching videos for months."

Once someone is emotionally invested, once they've declared their thing, they're way more likely to follow up with the boring logistics too. Lead with the exciting question, follow up with the calendar stuff.

Some people just won't respond until it's real

I used to take this personally. Like they didn't care about the trip, or didn't respect my time. But I've come to realize some people genuinely cannot engage with something that feels hypothetical. Their brain just doesn't work that way. They need to see a booked Airbnb and a flight price before the trip becomes real enough to think about. I have a friend, Marcus, who has been on probably six trips I've organized. He has never once responded to the initial planning message. Not once. But the moment I send "okay here's the house, here's what you owe," he Venmos within the hour and shows up with a carry-on and good energy.

So I stopped chasing him. I plan for the people who show up to plan.

Set your deadline, send your reminders, and then move forward. The trip doesn't need unanimous input to get off the ground. It needs three or four engaged people to make decisions and a group that's generally willing to go along with whatever gets booked. I've never had someone complain about the dates that were picked if they couldn't be bothered to submit their own availability. And the people who do respond will appreciate that you didn't let the whole trip stall because two people couldn't check their calendars.

The non-response problem is fixable. You just have to stop asking the wrong question in the wrong place.