As more and more people wait until their thirties to get married, stag dos are
getting more adventurous and a whole lot more expensive.
Legions of wealthy city boys are spurning London strip clubs and jetting off
around the world to exotic locations and scaring the locals.
With the glut of cheap flights making it cheaper to get to Prague than the
closest tacky seaside resort, your Easyjets and Ryanairs are filling with
noisy, irritating groups of half-drunk high-spirited girls or boys who you
wished were confined to Blackpool.
Our attempt at emulating other thirty-somethings was perfectly planned. My
best mate Steve proposed to his long-term girlfriend and they planned to
marry a year later in December, 2007.
So we booked a top end Ibizan villa for a week-long knees up during the
closing parties in September - a couple of months before the wedding to
allow plenty of recovery time. We couldn’t stretch to a private jet, but
beyond that no expense was to be spared.
Then bad news: Steve got a severe attack of cold feet and called off the
wedding. Our planned knees up had gone belly up (and no, they never did get
married - or back together).
But having paid a hefty £1,500 deposit on a £5,000-a-week villa we resolved to
party like it was the real thing. There were 10 of us in a mixed group,
including a couple of brave friends who had married the week before. I’m
told that a stag do with women makes it a hag, so we had ourselves a
pseudo-hag-with-honeymoon do.
Our bunch of waifs and strays included a project manager (handy), a
nutritionist (should help), a marketeer, a web geek, a cinema manager, a
fellow journalist (also a lawyer - just in case), a ‘colourist‘ (not so
useful), and a builder and plumber from our local pub (essential for running
repairs). It was set to be an interesting social experiment, hopefully not
as inane as Big Brother or frightening as the Stanford Prison Experiment.
I’d not been to Ibiza before, considering it cheesy and expensive, but it
fitted the stag bill perfectly. Arriving at the villa in Cala Moli, on the
southwest coast near San Josep, the owner, Monsieur Gerard greeted the first
arrivals.
The cliff top villa, over three floors, was more impressive than the brochure
let on. All bedrooms had terraces looking out to sea, with a covered
barbecue area, acres of decking and a large living room. And the infinity
pool.
Gerard’s paperwork was spread over a table and there was a notice board filled
with family photos. Perhaps it is a tactic to make visitors feel welcome.
The only disappointment was that the private jetty, 200m down the
spectacular cliff, had been washed away in a storm a month earlier.
The first evening we left the honeymooners and headed to Playa den Bossa for a
bit of dancing to ease into things. The town is home to clubbing mecca Space
and legendary beach bar Bora Bora but it’s more Costa del Sol than
sophisticated Spain.
I love hearing comments about how awful ibiza is regarding the stag nights , etc as I ope it puts people off buying there so the island still stays the same, Its the most beautiful island and for those that dont want to find the beauty, im happy for them to stay in the same place!
jax, london,
I visited Ibiza for 30 years - I have worked and lived there and it is for reasons such as that uninspiring troupe with their stag holidays and boorish behaviour that I no longer go there.
Could I organise group of young Spanish lads to come visit their home town and behave like that.
Ibiza was not born fully formed for the rest of the world to throw up in. Many people do actually live there.
Carol, Croydon,
this article really irritated me, Ibiza is not just a destination for stag and hen dos nor for the clubs, there is an awful lot more to the island, although unfortunately that's all that seems to get reported.
i'd like to point out that while the majority of places close at the end of the season you would be surprised at the number that stay open, and even the clubs. the island is even more beautiful in the winter time, perhaps because said stag and hen dos aren't here.
ruth, ibiza, spain
I note with interest your paragraph "With the glut of cheap flights making it cheaper to get to Prague than the closest tacky seaside resort, your Easyjets and Ryanairs are filling with noisy, irritating groups of half-drunk high-spirited girls or boys who you wished were confined to Blackpool". My question is "Why should they be confined to Blackpool?". Why Blackpool? Just send them into the middle of an ocean and pull the plug, this way they cannot harm anyone or destroy anyones property.
It would also be prudent of you to remember that there are very nice law abiding people who live in that tacky seaside resort you so nicely refer to.
Lesley Robinson, Geneva, Switzerland