Stag Do Destination Statistics: Prices, Flight Times and Visitor Numbers

The numbers that decide a stag destination are all published, just never in one place: what bars, meals and hotels cost in each country, how long the flight from London takes, which days it runs and which currency the group will spend. We pulled them from Eurostat, the ONS, Bulgaria's statistics institute and airline timetables for 13 cities UK groups weigh up, Sofia included.

Stag destinations compared at a glance

The table sets 13 stag destinations in Europe side by side, cheapest first on the price level for restaurants, bars and hotels, with the scheduled flight time from London and the currency the group will spend.

Bulgaria comes out cheapest on the ground and Sofia near the top for time in the air. Prague is the closest cheap option, 1h50 away in a country scoring 69.5, while Amsterdam and Dublin are the quickest flights on the list, in the two dearest countries to eat, drink and sleep.

Where these stag do statistics come from

Nobody official counts stag groups, so there is no official ranking of stag destinations, no official average group size and no official average spend. What official bodies do publish is everything underneath those questions, and every statistic in this post comes from them or from the airlines' own timetables.

Prices come from Eurostat's 2025 price level indices (dataset prc_ppp_ind_1), which price 2,000+ goods and services across 36 countries. 100 is the EU average, so Bulgaria's 55.7 for restaurants and hotels means prices about 44% below it.

Each index is a national average. The tables compare Bulgaria with Czechia rather than Sofia with Prague, and capital cities usually run above their country's figure. Flight times are scheduled gate-to-gate times from October 2026 timetables, read before the clocks change on 25 October.

Visitor numbers come from the ONS survey of UK residents' trips abroad and from Bulgaria's National Statistical Institute. Both count every kind of trip, so neither is a count of stag weekends.

Price levels: which stag destinations are cheapest

Eurostat splits its price levels into categories, and 3 of them matter on a stag weekend: restaurants and hotels, where bar rounds, meals and rooms sit; alcohol bought in shops; and passenger transport, which covers taxis and transfers. The household column is the general cost of living.

Bulgaria is the lowest of the 27 EU members in 3 of those 4 columns, and the one it misses is booze from the supermarket. The UK scores 123.3 on the household measure, which puts Bulgaria's general price level at about half the UK's; Eurostat publishes no category breakdown for the UK.

Bars, restaurants and hotels

This is the column that sets what the weekend costs once the group has landed. On it, the cheapest stag do destinations in the EU are Bulgaria at 55.7, Romania at 59.4, Czechia at 69.5, Portugal at 73.6 and Poland at 80.5, and the dearest EU country is Denmark at 142.0.

Bulgaria is the cheapest in the EU, not in the whole of Europe. North Macedonia (48.3) and Albania (53.3) come in lower on the same measure.

Alcohol from the shop

Shop prices are where Bulgaria's cheap reputation stops. Its index for alcoholic drinks bought in shops is 109.0, above the EU average and 15th of 27, while the cheapest countries are Italy (81.9), Germany (85.9), Austria (89.1), Spain (90.1) and Czechia (91.8).

It matters less than it looks, because rounds poured on a guided bar crawl or at a club count as restaurant spending, not shop spending. Supermarket pre-drinks are the one line where Bulgaria sits above the EU average, and Bulgaria's EU-lowest score for alcohol and tobacco combined, 69.9, is mostly the tobacco.

Taxis, transfers and public transport

Bulgaria's passenger transport index is 55.6, again the lowest in the EU, followed by Hungary at 60.5 and Poland at 69.2. Germany (117.0) and the Netherlands (122.5) run at more than twice Bulgaria's level.

A group's transport spend on a city weekend is mostly the airport run plus a few taxis between bars, and every package we sell already includes an airport transfer for the whole group, so the biggest single fare is settled before anyone lands.

Flight times from London

Ryanair's Stansted to Sofia route is scheduled at 3 hours gate to gate, with 51 flights in the first 24 days of October 2026 and at least 2 every day. Only Bucharest, at 3h10, takes longer from London; Prague is 1h50, Berlin 1h45, and Dublin and Amsterdam 1h20.

The clock matters as much as the flight. Sofia is 2 hours ahead of the UK, so the 3-hour flight eats 5 hours of the day on the way out: on a Friday in October 2026, the 09:10 from Stansted lands at 14:10 local time and the 20:00 lands at 01:00.

Coming home, Sunday's 17:15 from Sofia lands at Stansted at 18:30. Out on the Friday morning and back on the Sunday evening gives the group about 51 hours between landing and take-off, enough for a full 48-hour stag weekend in Sofia.

Frequency is the number that catches groups out. Tallinn's is the thinnest route in the table, at 14 flights in 24 days, and on a thin route the return day decides the whole weekend.

Currency and passport checks

Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026, the 21st country to do so, so Sofia now spends the same money as Lisbon, Vilnius, Bratislava, Riga, Tallinn, Berlin, Dublin and Amsterdam. Czechia, Poland, Hungary and Romania are still missing from the EU's list of countries using the euro, so Prague, Krakow, Budapest and Bucharest mean koruna, zloty, forint or leu.

Bulgaria and Romania became full members of the Schengen area on 1 January 2025, according to the European Commission, which leaves Ireland as the only one of the 13 destination countries outside it. The UK is outside Schengen too, so UK passport holders go through passport control on arrival.

How many UK visitors each country gets

The ONS count of UK residents' visits abroad is the nearest official measure of where Britons travel. In 2024 they made 56,032,000 holiday visits abroad, and 15,304,000 of them, more than a quarter, were to Spain.

Bulgaria took 350,000 of those holiday visits, about 1 in every 160, level with Romania and just behind Czechia and Hungary. Latvia and Estonia are not broken out. The figures are survey estimates, and the ONS puts Bulgaria's all-visits total somewhere between 582,000 and 732,000.

Of the 2024 holiday visits, 8,544,000 lasted 1 to 3 nights, 15% of the total and the bracket a stag weekend falls in. The table covers every kind of holiday, beach fortnights and family trips included, so it shows where UK travellers go rather than where stag groups go.

UK visitors to Bulgaria by year and month

Bulgaria's National Statistical Institute counts every arrival at the border by country of origin. Arrivals from the UK were 399,455 in 2023, 398,267 in 2024 and 343,444 in 2025, a fall of 13.8% in a year when arrivals from all countries rose 2.7% to 13,608,246.

Most of those Britons are not in Sofia for a stag weekend. Eurostat puts UK guests' average stay in Bulgarian tourist accommodation at 5.1 nights in 2024, against 2.2 to 2.7 nights in Germany, the Netherlands, Czechia, Hungary and Poland, and the months show why.

The summer peak follows the Black Sea beaches and the February jump follows the ski slopes, so the curve says little about the best time for a Sofia stag do, which turns on the capital's weather and hotel prices rather than the coast's.

What a Sofia stag weekend costs

Our 3 stag do packages are Cheap-Ass at €134 per person, a budget weekend of bars, an escape room and bowling; Legendary at €274, built round go-karting, paintball and a stag dinner; and The VIP at €558, which adds a strip club, VIP clubbing, a shooting range and a party bus from the airport.

We quote hotels in Sofia for the whole group once dates and numbers are set, from a shortlist of 6 that runs from budget to luxury.