This time last year I tried to bash in my best friend’s skull with a ping pong bat. It was Day Five of our shared villa holiday, and I was ready to crack.
This is the trouble with communal holiday living: although there are mega perks, without proper guidelines, the pitfalls can be as deep as the Pacific.
So here is a nice and bossy handbook of five commandments to help you navigate the perfect week of rosé-fuelled hedonism and poolside hangs.
Use your words
Most vacation rows spring from miscommunication. This has nothing to do with your wobbly Portuguese but a British inability to be clear about what you are expecting out of the jaunt. The trenches that need to be bridged can be clear: families versus singletons; men verus women, but others are more blurred: the expeditioners versus the pool-hangers.
The trick is to be open from the start. Singles should work out what the parenting boundaries are: do they want your help and therefore input, or should you keep your nose firmly buried in your bonkbuster when things kick off by the pool? While the parents have to be very sensitive to the singleton’s need for a hearty holiday lie-in.
For the sake of finances, have an ‘appy holiday
One good thing is that we are living through a golden age of holiday accounting. Unlike our parents before us where the most egg-headed member of the gang would be given the gruesome task of crunching the numbers at the end of the week, these days we have the miracle apps that are Splitwise and Tricount. Or Monzo Split if you prefer.
I can’t recommend the app approach highly enough: each round of ice creams and tray of Ouzo can be neatly split between only those who slurped or shotted.
Go your own way
My mother would always say you should never go on holiday with people much richer than you. Their children tend to trash the villa (a Keep Out sign will never deter the entitled), and you are shanghaied into going to expensive restaurants. In my experience, as long as you are firm about your budget from the start, it can be plain sailing.
See also: How not to be a dick on holiday
Especially as another great rule of shared holidays is that you shouldn’t be obliged to do everything together. There is no stigma in opting out or taking yourself off on an excursion, though manners might dictate that you vaguely ask if anyone else in the group wants to come too. People tend to be pleased to see you at dinner, fresh from a jaunt and packed with interesting things to say, or weighed down with market produce.
Beware of the kitchen
Because the notorious bearpit of villa life has always been the kitchen. Though you’re obviously duty-bound not to polish off the last sliver of parma ham, it’s equally obnoxious to overstuff the (often rather unreliable) fridge with whimsically bought and half-chewed market delicacies. Although even this is better than my holiday three years ago, when I discovered a bag of snails in the back of our rental car when packing up to go to the airport.
Remember you’re not a student anymore
The trick is to treat your holiday villa exactly the opposite of how you treated your university digs. There is no honour to be found in slotting an empty container into a perilously overstuffed bin. Don't just wipe the spot of the counter where you sliced your melon, or offer to cook a gargantuan barbeque, then refuse to scrub it afterwards.
Take a big gulp at the beginning of the holiday and realise that communal living means doing a bit more than you might like. There is more satisfaction to being the holiday’s MVP than spending your time muttering to yourself as you do sulky lengths of the murky pool or calling your mum each day in hot tears of self-pity as once again no one noticed you single-handedly unloaded the dishwasher.
Lather praise on the organised pals
Of course, in principle, a villa community should be drawn upon egalitarian lines. In fact, the organiser of the jaunt should get top billing. Give them the first choice of bedroom and take care not to moan too much about the spot that their hard work found for you; they will find it surprisingly wounding.
Just as you should do more wiping and picking up of other people’s soggy bikini bottoms than might come naturally to you, so too go big on the gushing. With everyone’s egos as inflated as the pool floats, you’re on your way to having the most blissful holiday of your entire life.
