Stag weekend firm StagWeb has £4m turnover

When Simon Denning was asked to be best man for a friend’s wedding, he went online to glean a few ideas for the stag do.

He was so disappointed at what he found that he decided to set up his own website offering stag weekends.

The StagWeb team

Now, a decade later, StagWeb has a turnover of £4 million a year and employs 15 people from its offices in Bradford on Avon.

Recalling the period when he set up the company, Simon said: “I was looking around on the internet for sites that helped arrange stag dos, but there was nothing good. I got frustrated and ended up designing a site.

“Initially, it was something I was doing in my spare time while working in corporate hospitality, and it just grew and grew.”

StagWeb arranges itineraries for party weekends and began with a modest range of UK destinations, including Edinburgh, London, Newcastle and Bristol, before branching overseas into Prague and the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.

It now organises trips to 66 destinations, including Milan, Berlin, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Brussels and Stockholm, and has had more than 160,000 clients.

The firm made the obvious step into the other side of the market – hen weekends – in 2006 with the launch of GoHen. That too has prospered.

To mark a decade’s trading, StagWeb has revised its website, www.stagweb.co.uk, with new graphics and images, and making it more interactive.

“We update the website every couple of years to keep things fresh and to stay ahead of trends,” explained Simon.

“It’s not a hard sell, it’s an information platform to make sure people make the best decision for their weekend.”

The company can organise every aspect of the weekend, with activities including kite buggying, sandboarding, clay pigeon shooting, mini moto racing and even a ride down an Olympic bobsleigh track.

When Simon got married six years ago, it must have been a tricky task for his best man.

“Actually it wasn’t, I did it myself,” laughed Simon. “We went to Krakow and I used it as an opportunity to meet an agent and try out some new things. It was a bit of a busman’s holiday but it was great.”