Updated October 2026.
Cheap stag weekends in 2026
Where’s the cheapest place for a stag weekend right now? The best up-to-date yardstick is the Post Office City Costs Barometer, which prices a short break for two in 50 European cities: two nights in a three-star hotel plus a basket of essentials, including a three-course meal with a bottle of house wine, a bottle of beer, coffee and a 48-hour travel pass. Flights aren’t included.
In the 2026 edition, published in May, the cheapest cities were Sarajevo (£248), Bucharest (£258), Tirana (£263) and Belgrade (£265), with Riga sixth at £278 and Vilnius eighth at £289. At the other end of the scale, Amsterdam came in at £609, Dublin £611, Barcelona £641 and, brace yourselves, Edinburgh £668, the third most expensive city in the whole survey. Closer to home, Cardiff was the best value UK city at £378, against £528 for London. And Prague, the old king of cheap stag weekends, saw its costs rise by more than 20% in a year.
So what does that mean for your stag do? Riga is the standout: cheap, a proper stag city and a short flight away. Bucharest and Belgrade are the ones to look at if the lads fancy somewhere nobody’s been. And Dublin, which came second in the 2014 numbers below thanks to cheap flights, is now one of the dearest cities in Europe once you’re there. Flights can still swing it either way, so check the fares for your dates before anyone books.
The pint test
Back in 2015, The Stag Company mapped the price of a pint across Britain and Europe. The Bratislavans were laughing at 88p a pint, while Parisians had to stump up an eye-watering £5.84. Prices have moved on since, but if beer is the main line in your budget, Central and Eastern Europe is where to start looking.
How it looked in 2014
What are the best locations for cheap stag weekends? It’s a question frequently asked of us here at iamthebestman. As luck would have it, boffins at travel currency specialist No. 1 currency published a report comparing a basket of stag do essentials – including a pint, a Big Mac and club entry – across 10 popular stag do destinations to help provide the answers. Well gents, the data has been collected and verified and I can now reveal that the most affordable place to go for a cheap stag weekend is…[cut to nervous looks from Eastern European countries] Bratislava! Or is it? Let me explain…
Cheap Stag Weekends: Prices Compared on a Basket of Stag Essentials
Rebasing the cost of cheap stag weekends
The Slovak capital came in at very streamline £96 including flights which by way of context compares to £302 for the same bundle of goods in Ibiza and so is officially the cheapest stag weekend destination. According to No.1 currency, the second cheapest stag do location was Dublin and third, Tallin. Dublin was a bit of surprise initially but the reason is to do with flight costs. Being near to the UK and home to cheap-as-chips charlatan airline Ryanair means flight costs are dirt cheap.
That got me thinking, what would be the cheapest stag do destination excluding flights? This would provide a truly like-for-like comparison right? And given the proportion of stag do spend is weighted more in favour of cost of goods rather than flights this might be a more useful way of looking at the data. So, I got hold of the numbers, donned one of those white lab coats and started doing some crunching of my own to find the real cheap stag weekends. To my surprise this Moneyball-esq exercise revealed a new winner!
Shuffling the pack
When flights are excluded, the cheapest stag do location is in fact Prague, beating second placed Budapest by £3.92. Or to put it another way, Prague is 12% cheaper than Budapest when you’re there. This is quite a change given it was in seventh place before. Bratislava, the widely published winner, actually comes in third when looking purely at the cost of goods. I personally think this is a more useful way of calculating cheap stag weekends because you’ll be buying multiple pints of beer over the course of the trip not one as the report states.
Cheap stag weekends: prices compared on a basket of stag essentials excluding flights
The devil is the detail in finding cheap stag weekends
Looking at the category level data turned out to be really quite interesting and revealed there is truth in the old adage that the devil is in the detail. Take Berlin for example. In my new analysis, where flights are excluded, it labours to a ninth placed finish – not exactly the draw card for cheap stag weekends. But take a closer look and this cutting edge, creative city has been weighed down by a £70 football match ticket which is 386% more expensive than the average across the other nine (£.14.57). This seems a bit unfair as the number of stag parties that go and watch a game is minimal. If you take out this category Berlin moves from second bottom to fifth, the first western city to follow the eastern block and is suddenly right on the cheap stag weekends radar.
Pound a pint – does that still exist?!
Whilst discussing categories, it seems remiss not to at least pass comment on beer prices. The days of ‘pound-a-pint’ are well truly past all but the most budget of student mid-week venues but not so in Eastern Europe! Beer is literally a pound in Budapest, okay, well £1.01 to be exact, but believe it or not there is there is somewhere cheaper the winner in this category goes to Prague at £0.87! By any standards that is incredible value for money!
Of course determining cheap stag weekends focuses only on the financials and doesn’t factor in how good these destinations are for activities and such like. Having been to all of the locations mentioned, including Blackpool(!), I think of the four eastern block countries the first two of Prague and Budapest are better options than Bratislava and Tallin on the basis of size of city (bigger and therefore more choice) and the number of activities available. If you do want to know more about whats going on in each location then take a look at our stag do destination guides, which are effectively the Lonely Planet for stag dos. Any other queries or advice, feel free to email me at oliver@iamthebestman.co.uk. Alternatively if you have any other suggestions for cheap stag weekends then help out your fellow Best Man by leaving a comment below.
Compare prices with iamthebestman to get cheap stag weekends
If you want to save money on your stag weekend then you can compare the price of stag do packages from the UKs leading providers in a dedicated part of our site. It works the same way as other price comparison engines – you say where you want to go or what you want to do and we do the rest! All you do is sit back and save the pennies!
