HOW TO PLAN A STAG DO
Right then, you’ve been saddled with the conspicuous honour of organising the (possibly) most important weekend of your (possibly) best mate’s life. Like it or not, you’ll be judged on it, and it’s worth will be measured not just on the weekend but on the amount of coverage it gets during the best man’s speech and amongst the wedding banter. So with your tail firmly up in the air, let’s talk through how to knock this one out the park.
So there are three things to consider straight off the back. When and where you’re having it and who is coming.
Now in stag weekend folklore, tradition often points towards a stag night the day before the weekend. This is of course fraught with pitfalls and only happens amongst those people who revel in potential car crash moments.
Far more commonly, great stag dos take place over a weekend with plenty of breathing space between the event and the wedding, so that eyebrows can re-grow and dignity can be reinstated. Often it can be a smart move to coordinate the hen do and the stag do on the same weekend, so it may be worth considering contacting the bride and/or chief bridesmaid to synchronise the calendars.
The next decision is where to go on the weekend. Segment the decision: at home or abroad? Somewhere fairly local and accessible or a more exotic trip away? Maximise offer 70+ locations all over the UK and abroad. Abroad destinations are not necessarily that much more expensive, but will likely result in smaller group of those committed to the stag’s cause! If in the UK you will want to consider transport. A destination further afield may require a trip by train, or better still Maximise Travel Service, with options for tailored door to door bus service and in location group transport.
In a similar way to the rise of the ‘staycation’ (people holidaying at home) a straw poll of the recent stags has revealed that the home stag has strengthened in the last couple of years. A big factor here has been the increase in the cost of flights. Gone are the days when low cost flights could be had easily for £30. You can easily check your flights anytime with the Maximise Flight Finder tool.
So if the weekend is in the diary for, let’s say, between 2-6 weeks before the wedding day, then next to consider is who to invite? This duty falls to the groom, and it is generally polite to invite all close friends and else besides, and leave it to them to decide whether they can make it. Friends on the fringe may be going beyond the call of duty to spend their hard earned cash on a whole weekend, so will be excused amongst adults from not attending, or better still they may choose to attend for only part of the weekend. Maximise understands this, and is very flexible with booking. You can alter the numbers as much or as little as you like up to 6 weeks before departure, and beyond that if absolutely necessary. See here for details. The more the merrier!
Perhaps the most awkward thing about organising a stag weekend is not who to invite – most grooms are generally of the ‘more the merrier’ persuasion – but budgeting for each individual member, and then getting the cash off them. This is one great benefit of booking through Maximise, since our customer area enables each individual too pay themselves, and also sends out automated reminders at due dates.
When it comes to things to do on a stag weekend, there are probably more options out there than you think. Firstly destination. This tends to get split into two camps: the Stag UK or Stag abroad.
The UK is usually more convenient and familiar, and may mean a higher proportion of people invited in the end attend the stag do, and the more the merrier is generally a rule of thumb.
Going abroad is generally less convenient, can be more time consuming and is often more expensive. In fact the accomodation and activities/nightlife tend to be cheaper (notwithstanding stag destinations like Amsterdam and Ibiza) but flights tip the scale. But stag weekends abroad are more exotic and the activities and nightlife are often wider-ranging and better value for money.
Stag locations themsleves often have themes, each one with its own merits. Newquay for example immediately conjures up images of surfing, windsurfing, bodyboarding, coasteering, cliffjumping and every other watersport you can imagine. Eastern Europe is great for the racier side of stag weekends obviously, and because stag weekends are such a great revenue source the activities are often highly creative and well-developed. Going to London or Manchester is always going to be great for clubbing at the end of the night. In short, play to a location's stengths and you won't go far wrong.
Then you have activities: to go with safe bets like paintball and go-karting that everyone is guaranteed to enjoy, or push the boat out a little with more alternative stag options like watersports or location-specific activities like Running with the Bulls in Madrid or Olympic Bobsleigh in Riga.
The only way to decide what things to do is to go for what the groom is most after. Its impossible sometimes to please everyone, but it is in everyone's interest to please the groom, so people won't mind sacrificing their preferences for his last days of freedom. Plus with our Online Customer Area, you can determine who is attending which activities, so if someone really doesnt fancy a bungy jump in Prague then they can choose to sit it out.
Organising a stag weekend is no mean feat, and even with the help of a stag organiser like Maximise there are still some decisions and dilemmas to contend with.
First off, this is one of the most important weekends of either yours or your best mates life. So everything has to go to plan. But as well as going to plan it has to be light hearted and entertaining. Acomplishing both at once isnt easy, which is why we prefer to handle the boring and at times tricky planning, so you can be left to the entertaining!
There are a number of key stages of organising a succesful stag do:
Inviting members
Setting budget
Choosing location
Choosing activities/nightlife/accomodation/meals
Organising Travel
Purchasing Accessories
Organising payment
Ensuring everything goes to plan
One key facet of planning stag weekend is that you will not necessarily know all the members of the group, and they may not all know each other. This can make collecting payment and organising stag activities to everyones taste more complicated than it sounds. Fortunately with the Maximise MyWeekend Login Area members of the group can pay themselves and are reminded automoatically, and can pick and choose which activities they partake in.
Trying to pick accomodation and activities and nightlife by committee is a sure-fire way to hold up the process, so instead you may like to use our proposal generator to put together a prospective stag do and then email it to the rest of the stag group for their feedback, using our automated system.
Choosing a location is one of the key decisions, as it must be reasonably accessible to the group, and also stag friendly. The locations we choose are tried and tested, as are all the accomodation, activities and nightlife in that location. The range of quality is broad, so dont take any risks and jeopardise your repuatation!
When it comes to budget, as is always the case with groups, you are only as fast as the slowest man so to speak. So while the Groom and Best Man often have a sizeable budget set aside, they are not about to stay in 4* accommodation while everyone else slums it in a hostel! Maximise ensures our customers get the best value because we work with all our suppliers in large volume and so can negotiate the best rates for a group. We also have a wide price range of packages to meet every budget, and stags can pay in small amounts gradually as they approach their stag party.
You can also purchase accessories on the site as well in our Stag Store. Groups get an additional 10% off also, they just have to access the store via the member area, where you can also enter our competitions, sort in surance, transfers, restaurants and anything else concerned with a stag weekend.
In short, there is a lot to consider before you can focus solely on having fun, so let us take the hassle out of it for you so you can do just that!
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