Trip Planning

Planning a Red Rope trip of a weekend or longer?

This page has important information plus useful forms you will need.

Guidelines relating to Infectious Diseases 

  1.   No-one should go on a trip if they have any infectious illness, or symptoms such as a cold or flu, or Covid
  2.   As from January 2025 – The Covid testing policy set up in August 2023 is suspended.
  3.  Normal compensation rules apply if a member cannot go on a trip due to illness. (See Trip Charges page)

General Trip Guidelines, Safety and Treasuring Forms

If you’re the trip organiser then for all the details please download the Trip Organisation Guide, please note this is the 2024 version

Safety on trips – Route Cards

The Trip organiser should consider what safety issues there will be for the trip. This job can be delegated to others. While on the trip, it is important that route cards are filled out for all groups going out, or for a person on their own. The trip organiser should take enough paper copies of the route cards with them on the trip, to allow for a variety of walks / climbs on both days.

RR Route Card rev Jan 2026 (Standard)

RR Route card for simpler walks rev Jan 2026

Is this a Winter trip? See the PDF about Safety on Winter Trips above

Suggested lists of equipment for walking in Winter and Summer (proposed by Mike Hargaden)

Trip roles

  • Organiser – deals with the accommodation, taking bookings and all details about trip but they should delegate
  • Food organiser – deals with the planned meals and organises shopping for the trip
  • Safety – Considers safety issues
  • Transport – coordinating the lift-sharing
  • Treasurer – uses the trip treasuring form to work out trip finances

Treasuring

This role is best done by someone who can do their sums! It consists of making sure everyone has paid, that people get any expenses back for food they bought for the trip, that transport costs are repaid to drivers, and similar. It’s all done according to people’s ‘bands’. There is a spreadsheet available here for treasurers to use on the trip.

Download the spreadsheet before you go! The form is in Excel and can be used on a laptop. Alternatively for national trips, there is an online version (in Google Sheets) that can be used; please contact National Trips Treasurer (triptreasurer@redrope.org.uk).

If you don’t have access to a laptop on the trip, you can print off the pages and take them with you. In that case you’ll probably also need the Petrol calculator (see below) – useful for checking payment scales for petrol cost. However if you use a laptop, the petrol calculations are done automatically (you just need to decide on the appropriate petrol price per litre).

Trip Treasuring Forms

If you’re confident with Excel you can easily increase or reduce the number of rows, but if you have any issues please contact the National Trips Treasurer (triptreasurer@redrope.org.uk).

Please note – When you download these files you may have to ‘Enable Editing’ before your system will allow you to use or print them.

The Petrol calculator

Petrol calculator PDF (updated to reflect fuel prices) Trip transport petrol calculator 2023

Children on trips

Trip organizers should check the Child Protection Policy if there are children under 18 on the trip.

ChildProtectionPolicy (PDF)

It is expected that normally children on Red Rope trips will be accompanied by their parent or guardian. If this is not possible we ask parents or guardian to appoint a responsible person to act ‘in loco parentis’. Parents or guardian should should fill in the form below, (InLocoParentis form) and send it to the trip organiser.

InLocoParentis Form (PDF)

Trip Food

Usually the trip organiser asks one of the members of the trip to take on the job of organising food and shopping – the shopping can be shared between people according to time of arrival and room in cars.

For some recipe ideas you should take a look at the Trip food and recipes page

Suggested shopping guide for 12 person weekend trip shoppinglist (PDF)

shoppinglist (Word doc)

It is Red Rope policy to avoid buying Nestle products for use on trips.

More information on these products can be found here: Nestle products