Firstly, I would like to congratulate the stag company for completely ruining my brothers stag do! I read all this rubish on their web site about world class stag do's and making your last week one to remember. Well they certainly have, they provide us with the worst stag do in history! I now have less than 24 days to try and sort my brother the stag do he deserves and erase the epic failure by the stag company from our memories. I booked a stag do for 11 men to Amsterdam for the 3rd June till the 5th June and was left feeling humiliated. Every bit of the stag do was a disaster, we got to Amsterdam airport for the transfer to have been booked twice and cause mass confusion. We were then driven to a hostel, that is 30 minutes away from Amsterdam central and a 50€ taxi ride back each night. The hostel has bed bug and I have photos of the bites my party have sustained to prove it, we were given no bedding and 4 towels to share between 11 of us! We headed to the first part of our stag do (part of our package), a prepaid entry to Nova night club. We found the night club and we were there before 11pm, as instructed in the itinerary. I told the lady on the door who we were and that we had prepaid entry, only to be be told that we were not on her list! I show her our itinerary, which showed we were in the right place, at the right time and she show me her list, which did not have our names on it! We then had to pay 10€ each to enter a club we had already paid for, so we could continue with our first night. Not a great start! Day two, the reason we are in Amsterdam "the not so happy ending red light tour". The itinerary told us to meet our tour guide at 9pm, at the The Tara Irish pub. We made our way there and arrived just before 9pm, we then waited for our tour guide. 10 minutes went by and after the night before I started to worry, so I went to look for anyone who could be a tour guide and nothing! I went into the pub and spoke to the bar staff, to see if they knew anything and again nothing! One of the bar staff lent me his phone so I could try and ring the number on the itinerary, that was for the tour and it just rang dead. I asked him to try and ring it, just to make sure I wasn't messing the number up and again it just rang dead! We then decided to wait around and have some food at the Tara pub, in hope that the tour guide might turn up. They never did and we wasted our last night in Amsterdam at a Irish pub, something we really didn't need to spend money on flights to do! Sunday morning and very much sober and depressed from this epic failure of a stag do. I figured I had better ring the number for the transfer back to the airport, to make sure we could at least get home from this nightmare. This is when I spoke to someone, who informed me that the tour guide from the night before "had got her times and date wrong"! This is not exceptable, the stag company have wasted our time and money on truly the worst stag do in the history of stag do's. To top it all off I logged a complaint to get our money back and have been told that it will take 28 days to investigate, how can it take 28 days? Your ruined my brothers only stag do and now expect us to wait while you "investigate"! Again I would like to thank you personally for ruining my first and maybe only time of being a best man and my brothers only stag do!

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!

I find it really daft if your weekend away in a city centre of where we are going is Newcastle and your put in a hotel 3 miles away from the city centre, I might of booked this in February and the stag weekend is in May, but I'm sure you can find a hotel with plenty of rooms in. Find it unacceptable that they have a certain time of 10 mins drive from the city centre. They can make excuses all they want but I'm paying a taxi fair to get to where we need to be they didn't even give me the option of having the hotel any further into the city centre and when I asked to be changed they said they can't do this now when I phoned the primer inn they said they would do this and cancel and move us but we would need confirmation from the stag company which they where not very helpful over this situation. Regardless or not you have a contact with the hotel you shouldn't of put us in a poor location in the first place I have had a look at where the hotel is and it's on a trading estatebuisness park I can't seem to find a pubs bars or shops anywhere near. I think the stag company need to take some time to have a look at where they are putting there clients in future. I have 2 of my friends getting married next year I will not be recommending this company for the stag weekend. Dan

We planned the stag do to Budapest, Truly ace! I booked it with less than 5 weeks to go and the stag company couldn't do anymore to help with the planning and organizing. They helped with getting activities sorted and gave good first hand experience advice as they had been there. The transfers we arranged were very good. Easy and direct. Met in the airport with a sign so easy to spot. We were taken to our apartments, which were in a good location and easy walking distance of the town's bars, restaurants and shops. The apartments were basic but what more would you want for a stag party? Friendly Reception staff and helpful with giving knowledge of where to go and how to get there. The activities we booked, Great fun!! bob sledding, wasn't what we expected, but pleasantly surprised as good fun and wasn't too far away from the town. Only thing that wasn't good, was the warm beer, never nice with hangover ha ha. We booked the traditional Hungarian meal with beer, great idea, as we had no idea where to eat. so nice as didn't have to make a choice for once. the Meal itself was delicious, filling and a good start for the night to follow... plus the service was friendly and polite. The bar crawl was such a good laugh. Our guide took us to some great pubs and clubs, well, that we remembered!! Overall a great weekend and couldn't of asked for more. Our overall experiance was great. Our guide was friendly and nothing was too much hassle. thanks again to everyone at the stag company for their help!! nothing was too much hassle!!!