ILs want to come for Christmas but won't organize it
To preface, I like my ILs. They are nice people overall, but they have terrible organization skills and a strong tendency to assume that we will change our plans to fit their last-minute decisions.
We live roughly 3 hours away by flight, so that has helped us setting boundaries a bit because if things are not organized, they are just not happening.
We usually do Christmas all together with the ILs and my family who live in the same area. This year my MIL and FIL wanted to celebrate it at our place, which we are very happy to do (less travelling for us! Also I love organising Christmas). The issue is that they insist that my partner's sibling and their family has to come too to have the whole family there, and the sibling and family are dragging their feet. They are the worst when it comes to deciding stuff at the last minute and then assume that we will somehow fit our schedule around them. Again lovely people otherwise when we do get to spend time with them, but this attitude is driving me bonkers. I had to teach partner to set boundaries with them in the past.
Anyway, we confirmed with them that Christmas would be at our place in June, and with my partner's blessing I helped my family booked their flights (non-refundable). We noticed that the price was much much higher than it used to be, so I warned the ILs that they needed to book their flights soon. This finally launched a discussion amongst them on how they would organize things, and it was decided the sibling would start looking for their accomodation (our house is too small for everyone and they're allergic to our pets so only my family will be staying with us and will help with the cleaning/setting up/cooking instead). They started suggesting some rental accomodation that they had found, but we turned it down as it was over an hour away from our place with very bad roads (especially in the winter) and made more manageable suggestions. Since then, no news. Supposedly, they're 'waiting for a reply' from one of the rentals (which one or where? God knows) since August.
They still haven't booked flights, which have now doubled in price (from something already stupidly expensive to 'could fly first class to another continent off season for that price'). My partner is afraid of asking them because he kind of knows that he won't get an answer we will like. They haven't cancelled yet either. At this point my bet is that they will say 'we can't come so please come home instead' and I am so glad that my family has their flights so we have a strong excuse to tell them to pound sand. I am absolutely certain that the whole family will not come, might have the MIL and FIL but even that is not certain. I offered my help to organize everything in the beginning so they have zero excuse.
Communication in my family is very straightforward and any behavior like that would have been called out with someone asking clearly 'are you coming or not?' with no offence taken if the person has changed their mind and doesn't want to come. According to my partner, not all families have our absence of subtlety lol so I am staying away from any communication on this issue and letting the partner sort it out. I am just so annoyed and needed to vent here!