You can do better yourself!

Firstly, its probably best to make clear that I think that there will be plenty of people who have a great experience with The Stag Company. If you chose to use them, I hope that they do better for you than they did for me. I wanted to share my experiences as if you use them, you will need to have confidence that they will get things right - being a best man or maid of honour is a massive deal and you want to do the best for the person who has given that privilege

To bring context to why I used them - as a best man I was proud to be assigned this honour. It was unfortunate that a close family bereavement mean that I could not apply full focus to this task. With that in mind, whilst researching where we could go and what we could do, I stumbled across The Stag Company. I dropped an email enquiry and had a really helpful and attentive customer representative call me back. Over the course of the week prior to giving go ahead on this, we would spend plenty of time going over the finer details of what I wanted and expected to make the stag do a success. From the Stag Company’s perspective, every question was answered with complete confidence and assurance that I really was talking to experts who would offer value for money and make this trip a success. I had one contact, I could rely on to answer any questions and handle my booking.

Once the decision was made and our trip to Albufeira, Portugal was booked, the contact who did such a good job in selling me the service disappears (presumably to sell more Stag do’s) and all my contact is handled by a web form where there is around a day’s turn around time to answer (mostly incorrectly) my questions. I don’t agree with using a personal customer service approach until I hand over my money and then changing this, but it didn’t ring too many alarm bells. I often had to send 2 messages to get a question answered correctly, but nevertheless, I was still trusting.

Alarm bells for me began to ring when for a couple of weeks ahead of the trip, I requested the address to the hotel so that I could complete my planning and this was not provided to me till 5 days before the trip, basically around 3 months after I booked this stag do. My realisation is that, they never booked my hotel until much nearer the time and this gave me no time to query the hotel quality or more embarrassingly , I could not tell the party, what hotel their money had paid for.

Its worth mentioning that we essentially used The Stag Company for our Hotel and Paintballing. We would have used them for Go Karting too but they could not offer the value of booking this directly and were slightly sketchy on some details. So we sorted Go Karting for ourself and ended up getting more for less than we were quoted.

Our Hotel was supposedly a 3 star hotel each room with 3 beds. When we arrived, there was a huge amount of road works in front of the hotel (can’t necessarily blame The Stag company for that) but each room was tiny, smelly with two small single beds and a fold out bed for the 3rd one. A rickety metal frame that looked like it had been found in a skip and does not constitute a bed. I intentionally questioned this before we set off and the Stag Company assured me that each room contained 3 single beds. This 3rd bed would not be acceptable if it was the only bed in a single room - so why is it acceptable that 3 of my group pays full price to sleep on it? I would have been more understanding had they explained this before hand. And the rooms did not fit the beds with enough room to make them suitable for 3.

Second to that, I was re-assured of its location to the main clubbing strip. That main strip was a 45 minute walk away. Locals told us it wasn’t worth walking there! A cab is better. Again Stag Company, just be honest and let me know where the hotel is so that I can plan for it. What made things worse when I complained later is that they questioned my explanation of the distance of the walk. Granted, when I plugged in the details of the distance into Google maps, it stated it as a 41 minuted walk, 4 minutes shorter than I told them….

The final issue we have - funnily enough to do with the final aspect of their responsibility was paint balling. When we arrived at the location on time on Sunday morning - not near to where we were staying, we found the location to the paint balling shut! After a number of calls back to the Stag Company in the UK, the customer service rep (who was brilliant in this instance) managed to eventually get us another booking later in the day - this is the short story of it!! It did somewhat ruin our day as we had to stick around that area until much later in the day to do the paint balling - not what I planned. The customer service rep, totally understood and encouraged me to log my complaint if I wasn’t happy and I decided to do so when I was back.

Again, I understand things go wrong. As much as we would like, no company is perfect…

But the responses back seem to deny any accountability for these errors, questioning my account of the distance to the main strip, denying not booking the hotel until a week or so before our stay even apparently telling me that the paint balling person told them we had a great time - which The Stag Company seem to think renders their incompetence irrelevant!? Apparently we also got extra paintballs for free…. Nope, not true! We paid for 9 people, one didn’t go for the paint balling and hence, those paintballs were what we paid for! Again, the question my version of events but we were there….they were not! Interestingly, for my paint balling in Portugal, The Stag Company uses a contact based in Spain to organise this…. WHAT!!?

My biggest issue despite the fact that they failed on the Hotel and Paintballing - the 2 things I used them for, was the lack of genuine remorse or accountability of these errors, only apologising with caveats. During our back and forth once I complained upon my return, they regularly took more than a week to respond only to NOT unreservedly apologise, but to apologies with caveats!

Eventually with photo evidence of the hotel bed, they offered to reimburse the 3 members staying on the fold up mattresses/beds 1 days cost which totalled £84 to be divided for the entire group. I decided to reject this as I feel it is important to let other people know about the experience I had and decide if they want to take a chance with The Stag Company. Personally, I wouldn’t ever again, and I warn others against them but thats me.

Whats important to get across is that, having done this again (I got the opportunity to as another best man), spend a little more time - and do it yourself. There is no way that you cannot achieve everything that they do for you by sourcing some activities and hotels yourself. You really have no idea who there ’suppliers’ are and how reputable they may or may not be. You’ll get better value and you’ll know what you are paying for.

Final point, which the Stag Company thinks justifies their lack of good service - did we have a good time overall? Yes we did - we were a friendly fun bunch, there to celebrate a good friends up coming wedding. Had we ended up in the middle of a desert, we would have made the most of it as thats what good mates do. The point is, we had a good time because we were mates ‘despite’ the work of The Stag company, rather than because of it. Oh and Albufeira is a great venue for a Stag trip too!