What to Do About the Friend Who Is Always Late
You cannot change them. You can change the itinerary.
Jesse Marchetti
Contributing writer
May 20, 2026 · 5 min read
Every group has one. They are usually the most fun person on the trip, which is precisely why nobody has ever said anything, and why by day three somebody snaps in an airport queue.
Stop scheduling around a version of them that doesn't exist
If someone has been twenty minutes late for eleven years, they will be twenty minutes late in Portugal. Build the twenty minutes into the plan and the problem quietly stops being a problem.
- Give departure times as "leaving at 9" not "meeting at 9"
- For anything with a hard deadline — flights, ferries, a booked boat — say a time 30 minutes earlier and tell them you did
- Assign them something that requires arriving first, like holding the table
- Never make the whole group wait in one place. Agree that the group moves and they catch up
The goal isn't punishment. It's that nobody spends the trip performing quiet irritation in a hotel lobby.
How to say it, once
Before the trip, privately, lightly: "We've got two things with actual deadlines this weekend — the flight and the boat. Can you help me by being early for those two? Everything else, no stress." Two things is a request. Everything is a criticism.
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