How to plan a bachelorette party: 24 steps, in order

How to plan a bachelorette party: the five guides to read first

Five questions, in the order a new organizer tends to meet them. Four of the five are about money or about somebody being difficult, which tells you most of what you need to know about planning one of these.

Who pays for what

The bride's share, the host's share, and the three lines that always start an argument.

What a bachelorette party is

What to put in it, what to leave out, and why it has to carry a whole number.

Scavenger hunt

How to ask, when to ask, and how to build a cheaper version that is not visibly lesser.

Supplies

Why eleven people cannot decide anything in one, and the two rules that fix it.

Bachelorette games that work

Nine that survive a loud room, and the four on every list that should not be.

The twenty-four steps, along the sixteen weeks

Nothing here is a stub. If a guide is short it is because the honest answer is short.

16weeks out · 5 guides

Plan the guest list and the number first

Everything in this phase happens before a single thing is booked, and skipping it gets paid for later. This is the part of the plan that decides whether the weekend works.

Who pays for whatThe bride's share, the group's share, and the four lines that start arguments The maid of honor's real jobThe four decisions only she can make, and the four to hand away by name How far ahead to start planningAbout four months, and two clocks. The date locks long before anything is booked Two bridesJoint or separate is the whole decision, and it moves both the budget and the guest list Hiring a bachelorette party plannerA flat fee near $1,630 that barely moves with group size. Reasonable at twenty, poor at nine

14to 12 weeks · 4 guides

Bachelorette party dates, city, house

In any plan, the date is found before the city. Then one deposit goes on one person's card and everybody pays them back that week, which is where money most easily goes sour.

Choosing the bachelorette cityFour constraints, applied in order, turn 47 cities into about five Booking the bachelorette houseAirbnb bans disruptive parties at every listing. The seven things to check before you pay What it costs on a budgetThe cheapest destinations are the ones most of the group can drive to, not the cheapest cities Six real weekends, itemizedGroup size, nights, the per head total, and what usually goes wrong

10to 8 weeks · 5 guides

The bachelorette party theme and the one booked thing

One anchor activity for Saturday, and a dress code short enough to be read once. Both are decided now because both need lead time and neither is urgent enough to survive being left later.

Choosing a theme12 themes scored on compliance and cost. five worth doing, two we would talk you out of The one booked activityOne anchor a day. What each costs per head, and the group size each stops working at Decorations that travelMost of it gets flown there and flown home again. Eleven things worth buying, twelve not Writing a dress codeA dress code that asks eleven guests to buy something is an unannounced expense Matching shirts, honestlyThe one single use purchase this site says is worth making, and the two ways it is wasted

6to 4 weeks · 5 guides

Dinner, and the small party details

The Saturday reservation is the booking groups leave too late, and twelve-top tables go four to six weeks out in every city on this site. Everything else in this phase takes an evening.

Booking dinner for twelveThe table nobody could book and the bill nobody could split. Ten formats, priced Games that workNine that survive a loud room and a group of eleven, and four that are on every list and should not be The playlistsThree of them, not one: getting ready, the drive, and late at the house The cakeAbout $55 for nine people, and the ones that go wrong go wrong in transit Captions and the hashtagSixty organized by the photo you are posting, and the nine everybody has already used

2weeks out · 3 guides

One message with the whole plan, then stop

Address, times, dress code, what to bring, what it costs. One message, not a thread. The instinct in the last two weeks is to add things, and that instinct is wrong every time.

What to packWho packs the shared things, what size bag, which shoes, and whether guests bring a gift What to wear, night by nightFour occasions in a two night weekend, and only two of them get photographed The grocery runOne shop on the way in, about $36 a head, and the four items that are not food

0on the weekend · 2 guides

The two hours that decide the whole party

Almost nothing here fits a plan made in advance, which is exactly why it is worth reading in advance. Between dinner and the second bar a group of eleven either stays together or becomes three groups of four.

Moving eleven peopleThe five bar plan does not survive contact with a group. Two places and one transition The photographsA shoot buys the posed set. The photos worth keeping come from the free blocks

Bookings, in total

House, flights, dinner, one activity, one transfer, and nothing else.

Six bookings is plenty. Eleven is too many. More planning past a certain point does not make a weekend better; it makes it a schedule that eleven adults then have to be managed through.

Why this bachelorette party plan is arranged by week and not by topic

Every other planning guide is a list of subjects. That is a useful shape for a person browsing and a useless one for a person who has just been asked to organize something.

The person reading this is almost never curious. They have been asked, usually by somebody they love, to organize a weekend for eleven adults with jobs and mortgages and opinions, and they have opened a browser tab because they do not know what to do first. A list of topics does not answer that. A sequence does.

Arranging twenty-four steps along a timeline rather than into categories has one practical consequence, and it is the whole argument for doing it.

It makes the bachelorette planning errors visible

Almost every bachelorette weekend that goes badly went badly because two things happened in the wrong order. The city was chosen before the budget. The house was booked before the guest list settled. None of these are mistakes of effort. They are mistakes of sequence, and a topic-based index actively hides them, because in a topic index budget and destinations sit next to each other as equals.

It tells you which bachelorette party steps you can ignore

A person at week fourteen does not need to think about favors, and the great cost of most planning content is that it makes them feel they should be. Seeing that favors live in the six-to-four-week phase is permission to close the tab.

It stops the party planning list from growing

The instinct in the last two weeks is to add. Each addition is forty dollars, none of them is the thing anybody remembers, and together they move the number by two hundred a head after it was agreed. A phase called stop planning is doing real work simply by existing at the end of the sequence.

If you read one thing here, make it the first phase. Every guide after it is downstream of those four decisions.

The six decisions in a bachelorette party plan, in the order they get made

Everything in the sixteen weeks comes down to six choices, and the order matters more than any of them individually. First the guest list and the number, because every other decision is priced per head and a group of six and a group of fourteen are different weekends. Then the dates, which are set by the wedding rather than by anybody's preference: four to eight weeks before it, and never the two weeks either side.

Third the destination, which is the decision that fixes the budget whether anybody admits it or not. A flight, two nights of accommodations and the local cost of a dinner are most of what a guest pays, so choosing the city is choosing the number. The destinations guide prices 47 of them per head so the choice can be made with the figure in front of everybody rather than after.

Fourth the accommodations, which for most groups means one house rather than rooms, and which is the booking with the longest lead time in the whole plan. Fifth the one big thing: an activity, a boat, a dinner, whatever the bride would actually pick. Sixth the small stuff, which is the theme, the decor, the supplies and the transportation on the Saturday night, and which takes an afternoon rather than the twelve weeks people give it.

What the plan for the weekend should and should not contain

Two booked things across a weekend is the right number. One dinner and one activity. Everything else is a suggestion with a time attached, and the difference between a suggestion and a booking is the difference between a weekend and a schedule somebody is enforcing.

What the itinerary genuinely needs is the boring half: who is arriving when, where the keys are, which car is doing the grocery run, and what the Saturday night transportation is before anybody has had a drink. Those four lines prevent more arguments than any amount of planning the activities, and most guides in this category leave them out.

Send all of it once, in one message, roughly four weeks out. A plan that arrives in fourteen messages over three months is the same information delivered as anxiety.

How to plan a bachelorette party weekend, step by step

Once the six decisions are made, the weekend has four parts and each needs one line of planning. Travel: who lands when, and which car collects whom, so everyone arrives at the house before dinner rather than during it. Meals: the one dinner booked, the rest bought on the grocery run or eaten out without a reservation. Activities: the one booked thing, with its start time, and nothing scheduled in the three hours before it.

And the house: the theme, the decor and the supplies, bought once by one person and packed in one bag. That is the whole itinerary, and it fits on a phone screen. The step most plans miss is sending it to the attendees as one message, with the per-head cost at the top, so nobody has to ask what is happening or what it costs.

If the destination is a surprise, or the weekend is at home

A surprise destination changes the planning in one way: the bride cannot help, so the guest list, the budget and the dates have to be settled with her first and the city kept back. Tell the guests everything and the bride only what to pack. A weekend at home, in the bride's own city, removes the travel line entirely and turns the house into one good dinner and a night out, which is a perfectly good bachelorette party and a much cheaper one to plan.

Ask the bride four questions, and then stop asking her

Every planning guide in this category opens by telling you to consult the bride and none of them says what to consult her about, which is why the consultation usually turns into sixteen weeks of the bride approving decisions at her own party. Four questions cover it. Who has to be there. Roughly what she wants the weekend to feel like, in one sentence. Anything she actively does not want. And the honest ceiling on what she is comfortable asking her friends to spend.

That last one is the question nobody asks and the one that decides whether the bride enjoys the party. A bride who finds out in the group chat that her weekend costs eleven hundred dollars a head has spent the two months before her wedding quietly apologizing to people, which is not a thing anybody planned and is the most common thing that goes wrong.

After the four answers, decide things and tell her. She is getting married in four to eight weeks and she has a wedding to plan; the whole point of somebody else hosting is that the bride gets to turn up. A bride who is copied into every booking has been given a second wedding to organize and a surprise she already knows the whole of.

The best weekends are not the most planned. They are the earliest decided.

RevelwickThe best weekends make fewer bookings and make them sooner. The correlation with total effort was close to zero. Settling the guest list and the budget early matters more than anything else.

How to plan a bachelorette party, answered

The questions worth answering first, at the length they deserve.

Who is supposed to plan the bachelorette party?

The maid of honor, traditionally, usually with the bridesmaids sharing the work and the cost of their own places. In practice it is whoever has the time and the temperament. What matters more than the title is that one person is named, in writing, early.

How far in advance should we start planning a bachelorette party?

Sixteen weeks for a domestic weekend, twenty-four if anybody is flying internationally. Nothing sells out at sixteen weeks. The reason for the runway is that the guest list, the budget and the dates take about six weeks of back and forth.

How do we plan anything with eleven guests in a chat?

You do not, and trying is the source of most of the frustration people describe. Two rules fix most of it: decisions are proposed with a deadline and a default, and anything that costs money is asked privately first.

What if the bride does not want a big bachelorette party?

Then she does not have one, and the job is to say that clearly to the group rather than quietly organizing a smaller version of what somebody else wanted. A dinner, a day, or a night in a good house an hour away is a perfectly good version.

Is there a bachelorette party checklist we can just work through?

This page is the checklist, in the order things have to happen. The compressed version: settle the guest list, send one number privately, find the date, book the house, book the Saturday dinner, book one activity, send one final message, then stop.

Or browse the bachelorette party topics the other way

If you already know what you are looking for, the topic index is here.