Go east young men

CZECH BUSINESS WEEKLY [CZ] -

Prague appears to be losing its status as the stag and hen party capital of Europe, as other eastern European cities rush to take on the mantle. The loss of revenues is already hurting some local businesses, but tourism providers say they are glad that the stag party era is winding to a close.

Despite the many criticisms leveled at them by the media, the stag and hen parties that have converged on Prague in huge numbers since the late 1990s have generated significant revenue for some local businesses. Nightclubs, bars, restaurants, hotels and lessors of private apartments have all benefitted, along with the twilight economies of gambling and prostitution.

But local tourism operators say these groups of predominately British and Irish revelers are on the decline in Prague, with many moving on to less eminent destinations such as Tallinn, Estonia, and Bratislava, Slovakia, which offer stag parties at even cheaper rates.

“A couple of years ago, people would only have had the choice of coming to Prague,” said Jacy Meyer of e-Blok [owner of Pissup.com], a British-owned company that oversees a chain of agencies offering lad, stag and hen party tours in Eastern Europe. “Now they can visit Krakow [Poland], Riga [Latvia], Tallinn and other cities.”

Established in 2000 in Prague, the company now operates branches in Warsaw, Poland, and Budapest, Hungary, and plans to open another in Kiev, Ukraine.

Several tour companies that sprang up in the early 2000s to meet the demand for Prague stag parties, have now turned their interests eastward. Their offerings remain much the same as before, as evidenced by the banal names of their tour packages: “Beer, Steak and Tits” or “Be a Bad Boy in the Eastern Bloc,” for example.

It is perhaps not surprising that many tour operators in the Czech Republic say they will be glad to see the stag trade move on.

“As travel agents and tour operators, we are pleased that this kind of tourist is moving to other countries,” said Tomio Okamura, spokesman for the Association of Tour Operators and Travel Agencies of the Czech Republic (AÈCKA) and a member of its presidium. The AÈCKA represents more than 200,000 agents and operators across the nation.

“There are two reasons why [stag parties] come to Prague—cheap alcohol and girls,” Okamura said. “We don’t want Prague to be thought of as a sex destination.”

Stag parties started coming to Prague in large numbers in the first half of this decade, after being frozen out of Dublin in the late 1990s by beleaguered businesses, tired of the noise and damage they were causing. Prague’s central location in Europe, inexpensive alcohol and entertainment, and cheap flights made it a popular party spot throughout the year.

“The stags were part of a wave of British tourism that started with the advent of low-cost airline flights from the U.K.,” said Hannelore Breitmeyer-Jones, the proprietor of Red Hot & Blues, a restaurant and live-music venue located in Prague 1. “Where we really noticed an increase was in the winter months of January and February, which were traditionally much slower than any other season.”

But now local businesses are feeling the recoil of the once-booming stag and hen party market. According to e-Blok, a typical stag party averaging 12 to 14 people, spends about £1,200 (Kè 49,000/€ 1,700) while they are in the country.

Hotel Olsanska, a large, three-star hotel in the city center that in the past averaged at at least one stag party booking per month, has not checked in a single party so far this year, said Jitka Blahoutová, a reservation agent. “It hurts our business a little,” she said.

Over at Rocky O‘Reillys, an Irish-style sports pub and restaurant close to Wenceslas Square that caters to stag parties, manager Rostislav Letko has also noted a drop in stag party customers over the last six months. However, he said the downturn has not had a major impact on turnover, as other customers had stepped in to fill the void. “When you have a noisy party, the normal clients don’t come,” he said.

Stag party participants typically spend Kè 500 to Kè 600 per person on alcohol and other consumables at the bar, but Letko said regular customers usually end up spending about the same amount having lunch or dinner at the pub.

In the early 2000s, an entire industry of youth-oriented party tour operators grew up to support the demand for stag and hen parties. One of the first was Prague Pissup, which bills itself as the largest tour party operator in Eastern Europe. The company’s operator e-Blok said it hosted tours in Eastern Europe for about 35,000 people in 2006, and now boasts branch offices in Warsaw, Tallinn, Bratislava and Budapest. “[Of that number,] we brought about 15,000 to Prague,” said Meyer, the e-Blok marketer. “The remaining 20,000 went to one of our other cities.” Last year, The New York Times dubbed Tallinn, Estonia, as the “party capital of the year.”

Scores of other companies specializing in international stag, hen, divorce or birthday parties are also surfing the wave, hosting events in Poland, Slovakia and Lithuania. In 2004, financial service firm Morgan Stanley estimated Britain’s stag party market at $1 billion (Kè 20.5 billion) annually. It has not conducted any followup research.

Red Hot & Blues, although not dependent on stag parties for its business, has seen its profits drop with their demise, said Breitmeyer-Jones, who said her restaurant did a brisk morning-after trade in breakfast, brunch, and various hangover cures, which according to Breitmeyer-Jones usually consisted of “Bloody Marys and ‘hair of the dog’ beers with their sausages and brown sauce.”

Her business ledgers document the boom and bust of the stag party trend: In the first quarter of 2002, sales at Red Hot & Blues were 10 percent higher—and first quarter sales in 2003 were 25 percent higher—than the same period in 2001. Winter sales remained steady with no growth in 2004 through 2006, and reverted to pre-2001 levels in the first quarter of this year.

In 2006 the British, at 566,225 visitors, ranked as the second-largest group visiting the Czech Republic, according to the tourism promotion agency CzechTourism. But the number was down by 13.6 percent from 2005 figures—the sharpest drop in any of the 10 top visiting nations.

In the first quarter of 2007, according to CzechTourism, 253,000 British visited the Czech Republic. In the second quarter of 2007, according to the Czech Statistical Office (ÈSÚ), British visits to the Czech Republic dropped 8.4 percent.

According to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), tens of thousands of Britons in stag and hen parties visit Prague yearly. And in its recently released report, British Behavior Abroad, the Czech Republic was listed as one of the countries where the most consular assistance is required.

Demand for consular services is so high that the British Embassy now charges Britons a hefty £ 80 per hour for after-hours responses for preventable incidents, such as passports lost in brothels, or arrests for displays of public nudity.

And in the Czech Republic, police can hold arrestees “for 48 hours without charge,” said Peter Wickenden, the embassy spokesman. “Don’t imagine that the British Embassy can just spring you out of jail.”

As the stag parties move eastward, the British FCO also has tabs on the potential for trouble in other nations. Today’s average British tourist in Tallinn, according to the office, is likely to be stag party material—male, aged between 24 and 35, and on a weekend trip booked last minute via the Internet.

Looking at the increasing numbers of U.K. citizens flying to Estonia—62,836 in 2005, a 62 percent increase from the previous year—and building on the lessons learned in Prague, the British Embassy last week announced a new action plan for revelers in Estonia. Its slogan is “Don’t let anything spoil your trip.”

As the stag and hen parties leave Prague to explore other parts of Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic could still benefit from the exodus. “[The country] has become more attractive to British families with children and middle-aged couples, who also stay in higher-end hotels,” said Karin Šeligová, spokeswoman for CzechTourism. “Stag party tourists used to stay in hostels or even without accommodation and returned home mostly the next day,” she added.

“There is still significant British tourism left in the wake of the stags,” said Breitmeyer-Jones, who added that most of her customers are British, increasingly couples with greater spending power than the stag revelers. “I can just imagine the blokes somehow noticed through their stag-induced alcoholic haze that Prague is beautiful [and made a note] to come back and visit with the missus,” she said.