The Rise of "Stag Tourism"
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| These rowdy blokes — who jetted into Prague to spend a weekend "on the stag" — are doing their part to re-shape European tourism for the age of low-cost flights |
By Lee Evans
A revolution of sorts is taking Europe by storm. Rock-bottom airfares are accomplishing what centuries of war, political squabbles, division, and mutual animosity have hindered: They're finally bringing Europe a little closer together. Europeans are traveling more than ever before, and what seemed implausible only five years ago is now a reality... hordes of Englishmen, Spaniards, Germans, Italians (and more or less everyone else) are descending on previously inaccessible locations like Estonia, Slovenia, Poland (and more or less everywhere else).
With a little advanced planning, the savvy traveler can now fly from Berlin to Barcelona, London to Athens, or Copenhagen to Pisa, for little more than the price of dinner for two. If I want to travel tomorrow from Berlin to Barcelona, the fare on easyJet is €255. If I plan ahead, the fare drops dramatically: €80 if I book within two weeks, and €29 within three months. Even at the full fare, flying to Barcelona costs roughly 20 percent less than the full-fare train ticket (and whisks you there in just 2 hours, instead of the mind-numbing 26 hours on the train).
But what seems like a breakthrough for budget travelers comes with a seedy underbelly. Two words are beginning to send chills down the spines of continental Europe's restaurant and pub owners: STAG PARTY (or, as we call it in America, bachelor party; a "hen party" is a bachelorette party).
The lure of cheap liquor and exotic prostitutes beckons Britons, Scandinavians, and other Europeans to continental Europe's sin capitals — Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Barcelona. And a strange phenomenon is occurring in smaller cities, like Ljubljana, Slovenia, or Bratislava, Slovakia: These inexpensive, sleepy, off-the-beaten-path towns become temporarily overrun by international stag parties. Then, as word spreads that they're too small to provide the thrills most party-goers are looking for, visits drop off.
Flying to Prague or Berlin to celebrate one last go at premarital freedom is incredibly attractive because it's so cost-effective. For the price of one night of debauchery in London, 10 merry-makers can fly to Berlin and drink themselves silly (perhaps throwing a few prostitutes into the mix for good measure) for an entire weekend, then return home as if nothing ever happened...and all with the benefit of never having to risk running into friends or relatives. ("What happens in Berlin, stays in Berlin!") Britons alone spend over £430 million annually on "off-island" drunken romps, with over 12 percent of all Britons having admitted to flying the "Booze Bomber" to Europe.
"Stag tourism," while a good source of income, is beginning to be a greater problem that Europeans bargained for. In Berlin, pub and club owners routinely face hordes of hard-partying foreigners who steal barware, destroy furniture, and leave the most intimate of personal "goodies" waiting to be discovered. Fights often break out. Berliners describe the area around Hackescher Markt as a "vomit minefield" on Sunday mornings. In the summer, Prague's sanitation workers sweep up a 767's worth of aluminum cans every month. Poor behavior isn't exclusively reserved for British stags; I recently witnessed a group of drunken Norwegians "Sieg Heil!"-ing their way through the Oranienburgerstrasse (Berlin's Jewish district) to the extreme dismay of all passersby.
These stag and hen parties are also no fun for police and embassy staff. The British embassy in Prague predicts that as many as one on four stags have problems — some resulting in death, like one in the Belgian port of Ostend last year. (Apparently hen parties encounter fewer problems.) Embassy staff is routinely called upon to bail drunken Britons out of jail and mediate disputes with the police. Groups of intoxicated men and women are also magnets for crime, from simple pickpockets to worse. The problem is so great that the British Embassy in Prague charges a service fee for helping stags and hens in trouble.
The logical extension of stag tourism is the increasingly popular pub crawl. Industrious entrepreneurs in many European cities (including Berlin) organize wayward tourists into drunken gangs that roam the club scene. With free shots and beer, and the promise of diminished inhibitions among other tour participants, €10 gets you six hours of fun at a series of different clubs and bars. Pub crawls are notoriously rowdy, and many club owners complain that the publicity and exposure they receive is far outweighed by the theft and property damage they suffer.
To be fair, pub crawls can be great fun and a convenient way to meet like-minded fellow travelers. The crawls themselves adapt to each city. Munich and Budapest's pub crawls are a little more refined, while Berlin's nightlife is internationally renowned and much wilder. While the crawl might seem excessive and hedonistic, so was Berlin in the 1920s...and so is it now.
While the allure of cheap tickets to exotic destinations is bringing Europe closer together, some are beginning to wonder if the sole purpose of the European Union was to expose liquor-starved hooligans to the continent's finest cultural destinations. In May, Air Berlin began service between Helsinki and Berlin for €19. We'll have to wait and see what happens when Finns are offered cheap tickets to a paradise where a bottle of Finlandia vodka costs a quarter what it costs in Finland.
What does this all mean for Americans visiting these places? Thankfully, not much. Though obnoxious and rowdy, stag partiers are generally not dangerous. At worst, you'll see (or hear) noisy gangs of drinkers bellowing their way through the streets late at night. As you like awake wishing they'd just shut up, you can ponder the side-effects of European unity.
Lee Evans manages the Berlin office of EurAide, a user-friendly travel agency that offers train tickets, reservations, and thoughtful explanations to Americans traveling in Germany.