Choosing a venue everyone can reach: the median travel time rule

"Where should we meet?" is the most mundane question in group planning, and one of the most poorly handled. Nine times out of ten, the answer is decided by whoever speaks first, then rubber-stamped by a group that would rather not argue. The result: two people travel two hours for a three-hour dinner, and they won't come back next time.

Choosing a venue is not a matter of taste, though. It's a collective cost-minimisation problem, with established methods. They've been used in logistics for fifty years and apply just as well to a forty-person conference as to drinks for six.

The geographic midpoint trap

The intuitive move is to look for the middle on a map. If three people live in Manchester, London and Bristol, you look for a point in between and suggest Oxford or Reading.

That's wrong, for a simple reason: distance is not time. A 200-mile trip on a fast train takes an hour and a half. A 70-mile trip on country roads can take two and a half. The geographic centre of a group and its centre in travel time can be a hundred miles apart.

There's a second, sneakier trap: connection availability. A central point with no station, no parking, or served by a single train a day is a poor central point, however perfectly placed it looks on paper. The number of connections matters more than the position.

Don't look for the midpoint. Look for the point that minimises the journey of the person worst placed.

Three decision criteria, in order

There are three legitimate ways to settle on a venue, and they don't give the same answer.

Total cumulative time. Add up everyone's travel time and pick the venue that minimises the total. This is the most economically efficient criterion, and the least fair: it systematically favours wherever the majority lives, and sacrifices the outlier.

Maximum time. Pick the venue that minimises the journey of the person furthest away. This is the fairest criterion, and it costs the group more overall. Use it when the imbalance is chronic — when the same people always end up doing the driving.

Median time weighted by frequency. The practical compromise: minimise the time of the more constrained half, while factoring in that some people already travel often for the group. This is the criterion that holds up over the long run.

The right instinct is to explicitly pick one of the three, and say so out loud. "This time we're meeting at Camille's because she's always the one who drives" is a sentence that ends a debate in ten seconds.

Rotation: the forgotten variable

A group that meets regularly — family, a club, a distributed team — doesn't need to optimise every single gathering in isolation. It needs to optimise the series.

Four gatherings a year, four different venues, each close to a different subgroup: fairness is achieved over the year, not over the evening. This reasoning unlocks situations that are impossible to solve at the level of a single event, and it has a useful side effect: everyone takes a turn hosting, which also spreads the organisational load.

Just jot down somewhere who hosted and when. Without a written record, it's always the same person hosting, and neither they nor anyone else notices until the fatigue sets in.

Questions to ask before deciding

The venue depends on constraints the organiser doesn't know about. Ask everyone, once:

• Where are you actually starting from that day? Not your home address: your actual starting point. Someone might be at the office, at their parents', or travelling.
• How are you getting there? Car, train, public transport, bike, on foot. A venue with no public transport rules out anyone who doesn't drive, and they rarely volunteer that information themselves.
• What travel time is acceptable for you that day? The answer varies with the format: thirty minutes for a drink, two hours for a weekend away.
• Do you need to leave by a specific time? The last train home shapes the venue choice more than any other factor.
• Are there any access constraints? Stairs, a pushchair, reduced mobility, a pet. These constraints are deal-breakers and they almost always come up too late.
• Can you give someone a lift, or do you need one? Carpooling turns an impossible venue into an acceptable one, and it's never organised because nobody thinks to ask.

That last question alone is worth the whole exercise. In a group of ten, there are almost always two spare seats in a car, and one person who assumed they couldn't make it.

The professional case: the venue is a message

For a team meeting, an offsite or a committee, the venue doesn't just carry logistics. It carries meaning.

Systematically gathering a distributed team at head office sends a message: head office is the centre, everywhere else is the periphery. That message is received, even if it's never spelled out. Rotating venues costs a little more in travel and pays off a lot in engagement.

Three simple rules for the professional context:

• Travel happens on work time. A team day two hours away that starts at 9am forces some people to leave at 6:30am. Either push the start to 11am, or plan to travel the evening before.
• Travel costs are never the employee's to bear, including for "optional" trips. Otherwise, only those who can afford to front the money show up.
• The room must match the format. A thirty-person work meeting in a noisy restaurant will produce nothing. The venue should be chosen after the objective is defined, never before.

Doing the maths without losing the evening to it

Cross-referencing ten starting points, ten modes of transport and three time constraints is a tedious exercise to do by hand. It happens to be exactly the kind of calculation a machine handles well.

OuiCanPlan asks each participant these questions, then sends back the venues compatible with everyone's answers, showing for each one who has the longest journey and why. You see immediately the trade-off you're making, instead of discovering it on the day, in the face of the person who just drove three hours.

Suggestions come with the reasoning behind them and, where relevant, links to check availability and book. The results are real and ad-free: no venue is suggested because it paid to appear.

Announcing a venue, not proposing one

Once the venue is settled, the announcement follows the same rule as the date: it's firm and it's justified.

"We're meeting at the café by the station in Reading, Saturday at 2pm. It's the spot that keeps everyone under an hour and a quarter, and there's a train every hour in both directions. Marc can pick up two people on the way from Oxford."

Three sentences. The venue, the reasoning, a transport solution. Nobody reopens a decision that's been explained, and nobody apologises for living far away. Which is exactly what you were after.