Seven golden rules of the group holiday

Forget chores and rotas, you have far more important things to be worrying about

Cover that post-Brexit escape with insurance as soon as you buy it (Getty/iStock)

It sounds like a dream - spending a week in a villa with your best buddies, soaking up some rays in a far-flung and exotic location.

But if you're not aware of the unwritten rules of the 'friends holiday', you could end up more stressed by the end of the trip than you felt leaving work at the start.

Every friend group is different, with its own nuances, but if you stick to the follow seven rules - you'll likely survive your trip without flouncing from your group WhatsApp in a huff.

Identify “the bossy one” early on

…but only refer to them as “the organised one”, for obvious reasons. The quicker you recognise which of you this is (if you haven't figured it out by day two, it's probably you), the easier yours and everyone else's lives on the holiday will be. They should be fairly easy to spot i.e. at the airport when everyone else is pondering over their sandwich in Pret, they’ll be frantically calculating which queue is moving quickest whilst furiously sipping on an espresso they somehow smuggled through security.

Find a bonus bathroom

Unless your AirBnb is a bonafide palace, chances are you’ll be sharing a bathroom. Typically, this shouldn’t be too much of a burden. But when Joanna has spent 20 minutes reapplying her lipstick and you're bursting at the seams, it’s useful to know there’s another bathroom close by. If you’re in an apartment block there’ll probably be a communal one on the ground floor, but if not, befriend a cheerful barista at your nearest café and kindly ask if you can use theirs (note: almost everyone outside of London is cheerful).

Be thrifty, not thieve-y

Your bonus bathroom will also come in handy when you run out of toilet roll. But leave the plush soaps and hand lotions, everyone has to draw the line somewhere.

Carry small change

If your group isn’t organised enough to create a kitty (though it’ll probably the best decision you’ll make all holiday), make sure you always have coins and notes to hand so that when it comes to everyone paying their bit for a meal/food shop/gelato pit stop, you’re not all waving fifties around each other’s faces like a bunch of ill-equipped Brits abroad.

Leave your gluten-free avo toast at the airport

Unless you have a genuine intolerance or dietary restriction, accept that whatever dairy-free, toxin-free unicorn diet you’ve been diligently following at home won’t make it past customs . Communal travelling means communal food shopping. While it might be socially acceptable to slip a tin of tuna into the trolley (because you “just can’t stomach cured meats”), it’s best to leave your favourite pretentiously priced nut-free, sugar-free granola in the freeform aisle.

Treat yo’self

Just because you’re on a group trip, doesn’t mean you have to spend every minute of every hour surrounded by other people. You’re on holiday, take the opportunity to indulge in some "me" time. Take a slow meander into town one morning, order yourself a double espresso and sit back and watch the world go by like something out of a Richard Curtis-meets-Woody-Allen film.

If in doubt, get the rosé out

When times get tough i.e. Mark used up the last of the eggs to make himself an inexplicably large fry up and Rosa has been left reeling at the prospect of a yolk-less life, it's time to throw cliché out the window with millennial pink alcohol. Because when you gaze upon one another with rosé tinted glasses, the world instantly becomes a far better place. Plus, it’s always 5pm somewhere when you’re on holiday.

PS: Leave the selfie stick at home, this is non-negotiable