The Ten Mistakes That Cost Bangkok Stag Groups Money

Most of the money a group loses in Bangkok is not lost at a bar. It is lost three weeks earlier, in a decision nobody thought was a decision, and it turns up later as a table that costs double, a villa that costs twice in travel, or four taxis at two in the morning.

These are the ten we see most often. Every one of them is cheap to avoid and none of them is avoided by spending more.

Booking the table on the night

A group of twelve walking up to the door of a good Bangkok club on a Saturday is not a booking, it is a negotiation, and you are on the weak side of it. The room that fits twelve is one of a small number in the building, and on a Saturday it was taken on Tuesday.

The cost of leaving it late is not usually a refusal. It is a worse room at the same price, or the right room split into two tables on opposite sides of a loud floor, which is the same as not booking a table at all. Rooms and tables at a venue we work with every week run from ฿3,500 for a small VIP that holds four up to ฿10,000 for a party room that takes thirty for the whole night, and those are the prices for the man who asked in advance.

Paying a door price agreed on the pavement

If nobody has quoted you a number before you arrive, the number gets invented while twelve men stand in a doorway wanting to go in. That is the worst possible moment to discover what something costs.

Ask for the entrance fee, the minimum spend and the bottle price in writing before you leave the hotel. At The PIMP, for the record, there is no entrance fee, bottles start at ฿6,000, and a bottle you do not finish is kept for you for twelve months. Whatever the venue, the point is that you knew all three numbers before the group was standing in front of a man with a clipboard.

The same applies to the room itself. A party room quoted for the whole night and a table quoted by the hour are different products at similar-looking prices, and the difference only shows up at one in the morning when somebody asks the group to move.

Splitting the group across app cars

Two or three men in a Grab is fine. Twelve men at two in the morning is four cars, ordered at the one hour of the night when every club on Sukhumvit empties at once, prices climb and drivers cancel. The four cars arrive at four different times, often at three different places, and the group spends twenty minutes on a pavement reassembling itself.

The fix is a vehicle and a driver who waits rather than a series of rides. Under eight men that is one Alphard or Vito. Eight to twelve is a van such as a Toyota Commuter. Above twelve it is a Sprinter, a minibus, or two vans on one plan and one phone number.

Treating a party bus as the main vehicle

For one leg of one night, a party bus is often a good decision. As the vehicle for the evening it is usually a bad one. It is slow in traffic, it is charged by the hour whether it is moving or parked, and it physically cannot enter Sukhumvit Soi 11 or most of the Thonglor sois, which is where the group actually wants to be dropped.

So the bus arrives, the group loves it for forty minutes, and then it spends the rest of the night parked on a main road while everybody walks the last few hundred metres to the places they actually came for. A good organiser will tell you when it is the wrong call, which is most of the time, and put it on the one leg where it works.

Booking a villa without pricing the road

A party-allowed villa outside Bangkok starts at about ฿18,500 a night, and that is not the whole price. There is a separate event fee, charged once, and a refundable security deposit from ฿20,000 sized by head count rather than nights. Then there is the part nobody budgets: the villa is forty minutes out, so the road is paid twice a day, in vans and in the hour of the evening you lose sitting in one.

A villa is worth it for a pool day and an afternoon that belongs to the group alone. It is rarely worth it as the base for a nightlife trip. Groups who want both usually keep a central hotel and buy the villa for one day.

Declaring eight men and arriving with twelve

The declared head count is the contract. A property that agreed to eight has planned staffing, towels, security deposit and neighbours around eight. On a relaxed villa the extra four cost an extra-person charge from ฿1,500 a head. On a strict one the booking is simply over, at the gate, with the deposit gone and twelve men and their bags in a driveway.

This is the single most expensive small lie in the business, and it is told almost every week.

Assuming somebody will host the night

A villa or a private room needs one sober person whose whole job is the night: paying, counting, handling the neighbour, knowing where the pool pump switch is. An event host for a villa night is from ฿7,800 for eight hours, or ฿22,000 for twenty-four including the overnight.

When nobody is hired for that job it falls on the best man, who is on the trip and by midnight is not in a state to be the responsible adult. The saving is real and so is the cost of it.

Buying fast track for the wrong flight

Airport fast track is worth paying for when a group lands at a busy hour with somewhere to be that evening. It is money burned on an early-morning arrival with a whole day spare. We arrange it at ฿2,400 per passenger, VAT included, and we say plainly which of your arrivals needs it and which does not.

Two related mistakes cost more than the fast track does. The automatic passport gates at Suvarnabhumi take Thai, Singaporean and Hong Kong passports only, so a British or Australian group queues at a manual counter no matter what it has paid for. And Don Mueang is not the second terminal of the same airport, it is a separate airport forty-six kilometres away, which is a real taxi fare and an hour of somebody's afternoon.

Paying for everything in cash on the night

Cash on the night means no confirmation, no record of what was agreed and nothing to point at when the bill does not match the conversation. It also means somebody in the group is carrying a great deal of money through the part of the evening least suited to carrying it.

There is a hard edge to this too. You may take no more than ฿50,000 in Thai banknotes out of the country per person, and larger sums of foreign currency have to be declared on the way in. A trip that runs on cash tends to discover both rules at the airport on the last morning.

Leaving it until the wedding month

Twenty-four to forty-eight hours is enough notice for transport on an ordinary weekend. It is not enough for Songkran in April, for New Year's Eve, or for any weekend with a major event in town. On those dates the good rooms, the right vans and the party-allowed villas are gone weeks out, and what is left is the expensive version of a worse trip.

Our packages start from ฿100,000 per group with VAT and planning inside the number, and they are cheapest to build early, when there is still a choice of everything.

What this adds up to

None of these ten is exotic. They are ordinary decisions taken slightly too late by people who have never run a trip for twelve men, which is almost everybody, because most men do this once.

The reason an organiser is worth the money is not access. It is that somebody has already made every one of these mistakes at somebody else's expense and writes the plan so the group does not have to.