Good houseparty venues are hard to come by, particularly because Christian Union groups from across the country are all looking for weekend accommodation in November. Conference centres are increasingly working on a rolling booking system, whereby they give priority in booking the corresponding weekend in the following year to groups that already use their facilities. Once you are ‘in the system’ this can be a great advantage but it means that it can be difficult to establish a new venue for your group. If you find that you do need to make fresh arrangements some general advice would be as follows:

1. Cost is a vital factory in determining how many students come on the weekend, and the major expense will be the accommodation. With a few exceptions, venues that are catered (i.e. they do the cooking as part of the deal) work out to be prohibitively expensive. This probably means that you are looking for self-catering centres (which of course raises the question of who cooks, see below).
2. Clearly you want a venue that is appropriate to the size of your group; there is no point paying for a vast centre if your whole party is only going to be occupying a small fraction of it. More importantly, it is important that the venue is not so small that many CU members who would like to come on the weekend are left at home on a waiting list because all spaces are taken.
3. The distance to the venue is a factory that people often overlook. There really needs to be exceptional circumstances for justifying travelling time of over 2 hours from campus to camp. Travel expense is one reason for limiting the distance, but long journeys also make for late starts on the Friday night.
4. A venue guide, published by UCCF, has recently been updated and may be a good place to start your search (download it by clicking hte link below). You might also like to ask local churches and other nearby CU groups if they have any tips. New venues do come ‘on line’ from time to time and if somewhere proves particularly good, or bad, please let UCCF know so that this information can be passed on to others.
5. Cheap and cheerful houseparties can be some of the best, but if you suspect it will be chilly then find out what the heating arrangements are and make it very clear to those who are going that they will need to take copious amounts of warm clothing. 
6. Above all, do your research into a houseparty venue as soon as you possibly can, preferably straight after the previous houseparty. In practice this means that you are probably booking a venue for the next committee’s weekend - don’t let that bother you, they will not be grateful if you leave them a clean slate, but in doing so leave them unable to book anywhere to meet.
7. If you are looking into a new venue you may need to be a bit flexible on dates. Write a letter to potential venues outlining your probable needs (writing to several centres simultaneously can save time, but remember to make it clear to any venues you reject that you do not require them to hold a booking for you). A specimen letter is given below.