Man spends £50k attending 56 stag dos in 18 months - and claims it was 'completely worth it'
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Watch: 'I went on 56 stag dos in 18 months'
A man says he spent £50,000 attending 56 stag dos across 18 months – and that is was completely "worth it".
Will Stevenson, 43, attended the stag dos of both friends and strangers, filling in for guests who couldn’t make the events.
After attending 16 stag dos in three months, word "got round" that he would fill in for no shows and he found himself in demand for stag dos that took him everywhere from Blackpool to Australia.
Read more: Sober hen parties are on the rise - and so are booze-free weddings (Women's Health, 2-min read)
Now married and a father of a three-year-old daughter, Stevenson says things are a "lot calmer" these days, but that he’s still paying off his credit card.
"When I proposed to my wife Abigail I told her I would stop doing stag dos apart from my own," he says. "That didn't stick – I did go on a few more – but they're not often any more. I keep in touch with more or less all the friends I made though!"
Stevenson attended his first stranger’s stag do in June 2015 after bidding online to take someone’s place who dropped out, which saw the Lincoln man end up in Budapest with 22 other men.
After his story was picked up by a BBC radio show, he was “inundated” with requests to fill other vacant spots.
Read more: What’s the price of being a wedding guest in 2023? (Yahoo Life UK, 3-min read)
He ended up visiting Ibiza, Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Amsterdam, Sydney, Las Vegas and New York. "There was a time I was going to so many that I felt bad ever saying no," he adds.
Before his wedding, Stevenson had three stag dos of his own in Blackpool, Brighton and Magaluf.
The average cost of stag and hen dos
Stevenson spent, on average, £892, per stag do – which is actually less than most people.
Data from insurance company Aviva from 2023 found that British men spend an average of £920 attending a stag do, which includes food, accommodation, drinks and any travel, while British women spend £652 on average to attend a hen do.
This figure rises further for hen and stag dos abroad, with men spending £1,256 to attend a stag do abroad, while women spend £1,158 to attend a hen do overseas.
It’s no surprise then that a third of people said they have declined a pre-wedding party invite due to the high expenses.
