Best of Travel

The Best Girls’ Trip Destinations, Matched to Your Group

Plan Your Group’s Trip With an Advisor

Every girls’ group chat eventually arrives at the same question. Not when. Where.

And it stalls there, usually for months, because the group is answering the wrong question. The argument is never really about the destination — it’s about what the trip is for. One person wants a vineyard and a long lunch. One wants a rooftop at midnight. One wants a cabin where everybody swears they’ll unplug and then absolutely does not. Put those three in a poll and you get deadlock. Sort them by style first and the destination picks itself in about ten minutes.

We built this list on the podcast — Barbie and I ran through it on Episode 215, one travel style at a time — and it’s the same sorting we do on a real planning call. Eight styles, five destinations each. The judgement calls about who each one suits are ours, drawn from the trips we actually book.

The real best girls’ trip is the one that matches your group — not the one that looks best online.

Start with the style, not the map

Here’s the mistake almost every group makes: they start with a destination somebody saw, then work backwards trying to justify it to five other people. It never holds, because a place that’s perfect for a wine weekend is often actively wrong for a group that wants to be out until two.

So run it the other way. Agree on the style first — one word, put it to a vote — and only then look at the map. The eight categories below are how we split it. Find the one your group actually is, and the shortlist is five deep instead of infinite.

1. For the wine lovers

Napa Valley is the polished classic and the easiest sell to a group that’s never done this before. Temecula is the sunny Southern California alternative and a fraction of the effort to reach. Chianti and Montepulciano put you in villa-and-vineyard Tuscany, which is the version most groups are actually picturing. Bordeaux is for the group that wants serious wine history and grand architecture with it.

Best for: Groups who want long lunches and a driver.
Our pick: Montepulciano — the same Tuscany fantasy as Chianti with meaningfully fewer coaches.

2. For the city lovers

New York for nonstop energy. Barcelona for architecture and dinners that start when you’d normally be going to bed. Tokyo for immaculate big-city adventure. Lisbon for hills and tiled beauty at a gentler price. Savannah for a slower, charming long weekend that still feels like a proper trip.

Best for: Groups who’d rather walk twelve miles than sit by a pool.
Our pick: Lisbon — it does more for the money than anywhere else on this line.

3. Cabin and cottage

This is the cozy-morning category, where the house is the point. Lake Martin in Alabama and Lake Chelan in Washington are lake life done properly. Jackson Hole brings mountain drama. Nantucket is coastal polish. The Cotswolds are storybook villages and the best possible excuse to rent something with a fireplace.

Best for: Groups who want to cook together and not look at a schedule.
Our pick: The Cotswolds, if the flight isn’t a dealbreaker. Lake Chelan if it is.

4. For the shoppers

Palm Beach and Saint Barthélemy bring resort style, where the shopping is half the social calendar. Verona offers Italian boutiques in a setting that does a lot of the romance for you. Paris is fashion’s heavyweight and needs no argument. London mixes luxury flagships with markets and genuinely good vintage.

Best for: Groups whose ideal afternoon has bags in it.
Our pick: London — the widest range of budgets in one city, which matters more than people expect.

5. For the adventurers

Iceland for waterfalls and volcanic landscape that doesn’t look real in photos. Moab for red-rock hiking. Jackson Hole for wildlife and the Tetons. Banff for those turquoise lakes. Telluride for mountain-town adventure with a proper town attached.

Best for: Groups who’ll be up at six without complaining.
Our pick: Iceland. It’s the one this group will still be talking about in five years.

6. Pool chasers

Nice and Saint-Tropez deliver the Riviera and everything that implies. Palm Springs brings mid-century cool and the shortest flight of the group for anyone on the West Coast. Tulum mixes beach-club energy with Caribbean water. Scottsdale is the easy spa-and-resort escape that almost never disappoints.

Best for: Groups whose entire brief is “somewhere warm, nothing scheduled.”
Our pick: Scottsdale for a first trip together, Saint-Tropez when the group has earned it.

7. For wellness

Joshua Tree is desert stillness. Bali is retreat culture done at scale and done well. Sedona is red-rock restoration. Costa Rica pairs wellness with genuine rainforest adventure, which suits groups that can’t all agree to sit still. Jeju Island offers volcanic landscapes and a restorative island pace most Americans have never considered.

Best for: Groups arriving tired and wanting to leave different.
Our pick: Costa Rica — the only one here that satisfies both the spa people and the hikers.

8. Nightlife

Mykonos and Miami are glam until very late. Charleston combines serious dinners with walkable bar-hopping, which is the civilised version. New Orleans adds live music and more personality than anywhere else on the list. Cabo San Lucas makes the party feel like a vacation from the moment you land.

Best for: Groups where nobody is pretending they want an early night.
Our pick: New Orleans — the only one where the days are as good as the nights.

The eight styles, side by side

The lightning round

Best easy long weekend

Savannah, Charleston, Palm Beach, Scottsdale or Temecula. All of them work on a Thursday-to-Sunday without anybody burning vacation days on flying.

Best once-in-a-lifetime splurge

Tokyo, Bali, Saint Barths, Mykonos or Tuscany. These are the trips worth building a year around rather than squeezing into a long weekend.

Best mix of relaxing and doing

Costa Rica, Banff, Lake Chelan, Tulum or Lisbon. Use these when half the group wants an itinerary and half wants a hammock — they genuinely serve both.

Best when budgets don’t match

New Orleans, Savannah, Moab, Lisbon or Palm Springs. This is the most underrated category on the list. Every one of these has a real range of hotels and restaurants, so nobody has to announce what they can’t afford.

Best “we’ll talk about this forever”

Iceland, Tokyo, Bali, Mykonos or Paris.

Get a Shortlist Built Around Your Group

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best girls’ trip destination?

There isn’t one, and that’s the point. The best destination depends entirely on whether your group wants wine, a city, a cabin, shopping, adventure, a pool, wellness or nightlife. Agree the style first and the shortlist narrows to five. Lisbon and New Orleans are the safest picks for mixed groups.

Where should we go for a girls’ trip on different budgets?

New Orleans, Savannah, Moab, Lisbon and Palm Springs. Each has genuine range in hotels and restaurants, so people can spend differently without anyone having to say so out loud. That matters more to group harmony than the destination itself.

What’s the best girls’ trip for a long weekend?

Savannah, Charleston, Palm Beach, Scottsdale or Temecula. All five work Thursday to Sunday without long-haul flights eating two of your days. If you only have three nights, keep the flight under four hours — that single rule saves most short trips.

How far in advance should we book a group trip?

Six to nine months for peak-season villas and anything requiring a block of rooms; three to four months for a domestic long weekend. That’s our own planning benchmark rather than a published figure. The constraint is almost always the house or the block of rooms, not the flights.

How many people is too many for a girls’ trip?

Six to eight is the sweet spot in our experience — large enough for energy, small enough to fit one dinner table and one car. Past ten you need a group coordinator, split accommodation and a real itinerary, which changes the character of the trip entirely.

The Dorian Destinations Verdict

If your group can’t agree, book Lisbon. It quietly satisfies more of these categories at once than anywhere else on the list — it’s a proper city, the food is extraordinary, the wine is serious, it’s walkable, the nightlife is there if you want it, and the price gap between the person who wants the nice hotel and the person watching every euro is small enough that nobody feels it.

If your group can agree, be more ambitious than that. The trips people remember are the ones with a clear identity: the Iceland trip, the Tuscany trip, the New Orleans trip. A destination chosen by committee to offend nobody usually delights nobody either.

And the piece of advice we give most often on planning calls has nothing to do with the map. Decide early who is booking, who is paying, and how the money moves — before anybody falls in love with a villa. Almost every group trip that goes sideways goes sideways over logistics, not the destination.

Meet the Advisors Who Plan These Trips

Source: the eight style categories and their destinations come from the “Best Spots for a Girls’ Trip” segment of the Dorian Destinations Podcast, Episode 215, hosted by Franco Interian and Barbie Villacis. The recommendations, pairings and booking guidance are our own advisory judgment.

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