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We’re all a bit traumatised still from Croatia,” Will tells me. “From the get-go, it was bad behaviour from everyone.” Will is 27 now, but his trip abroad with three friends from sixth form is still so infamous in his circle that it could have happened yesterday. “Fighting over tiny amounts of money, who makes what for dinner, losing expensive beach towels from our balcony…” Holiday etiquette had soured to the point where Will’s friend, Lily*, was deliberately locked out on their balcony and left by herself while the rest of the group went out for lunch. “I keep saying, ‘Let’s do another trip’, but I think everyone’s scared because we were all so badly behaved.”
Going on holiday with your friends should be a doddle, right? You normally get along like a house on fire, you share similar interests, and you’ve never argued before. So what is it about holidaying that can cause a friendship meltdown? According to a survey by Babbel, one in five (21 per cent) of Brits have broken up with a friend as a result of a holiday spat. The most common cause? Rows about “getting lost, or disagreements over directions” (22 per cent), closely followed by “choosing where to eat” (20 per cent) and “deciding what to do each day” (19 per cent). Men are also more prone to quarrelling while away, with 30 per cent of male respondents experiencing this compared with 14 per cent of female respondents.
For Will, the moment tension erupted between the group was when they were waiting to board a boat to a party island. “We’d been pre-drinking, and as we walked up to the pier, Lily goes, ‘I don’t want to go, I’m not going’. Then our other friend goes, ‘If she isn’t going then I’m not going’. Everyone decides not to go, and I lose my s***. We had a massive argument; I stormed onto the boat alone and got absolutely wrecked on the island. The morning after was the most awkward thing of my life.” Despite the theatrics in Croatia, the group remain close friends – although they haven’t ventured abroad together since.
Alcohol is certainly a catalyst for holiday fallouts, with Dutch courage tending to expose underlying tensions within the friendship. In Babbel’s survey, one in 10 Brits experienced tension with companions on a holiday due to a drunken argument. This was certainly the case for 27-year-old Maya*, who went on holiday to Malia, in Crete, with two college friends and flew home the next day.
“It was the summer we finished our A-levels,” she tells me. “As soon as we touched down, we went out and got drunk with a big group of lads who were in the apartment next to us. My friend Abi* had just got a new boyfriend who she’d met at her new cafe job, and she was obsessed with it. All night, everything was related back to the cafe and her new boyfriend, and it was getting annoying and tiring.”
When Maya made a joke about Abi’s endless mentioning of her bar job, a drunken argument broke out. “Before we went to bed, both of us shouted ‘I’m not staying here any longer, I’m booking a flight tomorrow’,” Maya remembers. “The next day I woke up and thought, ‘f*** it, I’m actually going to do it’.” Maya called her dad, who booked her the afternoon flight home, only to discover Abi had the same idea. “We were on the same flight back,” she laughs. “[Later], my dad picks me up from the airport, her dad picks her up, and we never speak again. The last time I saw her was at that luggage carousel.”
Holidaying with friends when you’re young is seen as a rite of passage and a fun way to form core memories, but it can also put you at higher risk of bust-ups. According to a recent Zing survey, those aged between 25 and 34 are most likely to experience arguments (35 per cent). For 28-year-old Grace, a month-long trip around Thailand caused the breakdown of her friendship with her best friend of eight years, Anna*. “The last time I saw her was outside Bangkok airport,” she tells me. “I checked into a hotel and couldn’t have been happier to be on my own.”
Grace had booked four weeks in Thailand so she could join Anna, who was on her gap year. Soon upon arrival, there were red flags. “She told me she’d met the man of her dreams in the Philippines. She said she would meet him after our trip and then eventually she’d move into his house in Canada. I was happy for her, obviously. But she’d made a promise to get back together with her ex-boyfriend who was waiting for her back home. I told her she had to tell him, but she didn’t want to.”
It was two weeks into the trip when things turned mean-spirited. “We went to a club and ordered drinks. She ordered the wrong drink for me, so I went back to the bar and ordered another drink, but she stormed off. I went after her, and she was shouting. It was like she had built up this anger towards me. We had a physical fight; my hair was falling out. I went straight to the toilet, locked the door and facetimed a friend from home. The next day Anna and I chatted about the argument, and she said it’s normal for friends to get into fights. I was a little apprehensive about it, but we made up.”
The trip took another turn for the worse when Grace found out that Anna had cancelled their boat back to the mainland so she could stay on a Thai island for another night. “I couldn’t believe it, I just wanted to get out of there,” Grace recalls. “I was thinking, who is this person I’m on holiday with?” After another fall-out, the pair finally aired the beef. “She claimed I didn’t care about our friendship, and that I didn’t make any effort. I was sitting there thinking, ‘I have come all the way to Thailand to see you’.”
The trip had ramifications long after Grace’s suitcase was unpacked. “We haven’t spoken since we said goodbye to each other in Bangkok,” she says. “She turned into a completely different person. I don’t hold any resentment over her, though. Thailand was five years ago now; I look back and reflect on it and think we outgrew each other.”
So how can we ensure our friendships don’t risk becoming relics due to a holiday from hell? Jessi Gholami, a licensed parent-child interaction therapist, believes effective communication is at the heart of avoiding friendship fallouts. “Being honest about your needs and expectations before the trip can make a huge difference to the whole experience,” she says. “Talking openly about what everyone wants helps create understanding… what better way to kick things off?”
Money is another delicate subject that should be handled early on. “Be clear about what’s affordable and comfortable for everyone before booking anything,” Gholami says. “It might feel awkward at first but sorting it out upfront is so much easier than dealing with tension over splitting bills or someone feeling out of their depth financially. Using an app to track shared expenses can take a lot of the guesswork out of things.”
Factoring in downtime is equally as important, no matter how close the friendship. “It’s something people often forget to build in, but it’s so important,” Gholami tells me. “Even best friends need time apart to recharge. Little breaks away can make all the difference and help prevent minor irritations from bubbling over into major events.”
While holidays are essentially meant to be an enjoyable experience, they can also provide fertile ground for relationships to be tested. So if you’re thinking of booking that summer trip, simple measures such as having honest conversations about money and building in downtime can ensure you and your friends come home with good memories, rather than regrets.
*Names changed to protect the guilty
