US Edition
Why I spend £6k a year on hen parties
As the bachelorette party gets ever more expensive, have we reached peak hen do?
“Right, that’s it,” my friend Laura announces to a table of assembled girlfriends one Friday night in the pub. “I’ve decided I’m not doing hen dos anymore. It’s a blanket ban from here on. If any of you get engaged I’ll come to your wedding, but I’m calling time on £450 weekends in a rubbish Airbnb in Kent. I’m a grown woman; there are only so many boozy scavenger hunts I can take. I love you all, but I’m out. You can expect my press release on the subject in your inboxes within the week.”
She wasn’t joking. As this summer’s hen do invitations began to flood in, Laura began to politely decline them one by one. She’d quietly leave every irritatingly named WhatsApp group (the notification – “Laura has left Soph’s Super Smashing Secret Hen chat” – a real power move). The final straw? An invitation to a second hen do for a wedding that has already happened but is getting a post-lockdown do-over; Laura had already forked out for the first one, pre-pandemic.
The money-haemorrhaging contemporary hen do is the scourge of the 30-something woman, a rite of passage I never knowingly signed up for but which now consumes my weekends, from the start of April through to the end of July. Ever since lockdown lifted, my social calendar has been awash with hen parties. And these days they're never just a one-night-only boozy dinner with your nearest and dearest. No, when you agree to attend a hen do in 2022, you’re signing away at least £300 (though in reality, I’ve found myself spending double that in the past) for two nights away, a props budget, and a schedule of activities ranging from the pointless (“So we’re going to have someone come to the house and give us a VIP cocktail experience where we’ll create a drink inspired by the bride”) to the genuinely ridiculous (“On the Sunday, we’re doing a yoga class on paddleboards” – this will be after bottomless brunch so please do remember to pace yourselves, ladies, I need to be able to sign a disclaimer saying we’re not too drunk to be near water). Oh, and we’re all going to wear button-up pyjamas on the SUPs because they’re Lucy’s favourite, and also it’s fun, isn’t it? Isn’t it just fun?” Sure. Of course it is.
Would I, given the choice, devote a Saturday afternoon to decorating a pair of knickers? Probably not, nor am I hugely inclined to fork out £40 for the privilege. I wouldn’t necessarily choose to down a shot of Bailey's and a rosé chaser on the street in the middle of Norwich pre-midday either. But alas, I am a 30-year-old woman – choice doesn’t come into it. The hen do economy has me in its grips, and I can see no way out for a good five years yet.
I don’t want to sound like an insufferable spoilsport but, when you’re going to this many hen dos and weddings (and when they seem to be getting more and more lavish by the minute), the money does begin to stack up. I spend between £5,000 and £6,000 a year on other people’s big days. They’re (almost always) good fun, I’m always grateful to have been invited, and I’m not claiming it’s any great hardship to spend the weekend getting drunk in a Travelodge just outside Bath. But when you’re boarding yet another train at Paddington at the end of a long week, armed with mini bottles of prosecco and bags of M&S crisps for the third Friday in a row, the whole ordeal and unnecessary cost of it all does start to hit home.
I’m not alone – one in ten of us says we spend the same on a hen as we might on a summer holiday. The national average is around £250, according to one recent survey, though many find themselves forking out far more. Add that to the money you’ll inevitably spend on attending the wedding (factoring in accommodation, travel, a gift, a panic-bought dress) and you’ve soon racked up a chunky bill, especially if either (or both) are abroad. A day or two’s annual leave is often required, too, meaning you can end up losing a week of your holiday allowance just getting to and from people’s hens and weddings.
Brides Magazine predicted 1,100,000 hen and stag parties would take place this year, with a double whammy of celebrations as so many are finally taking place having been postponed during lockdown. The trouble is, somewhere in the past two years, hen dos seem to have become a law unto themselves. Nothing is considered too much now. “We have people going to Vegas with us for around the £800 mark,” says Alicia Currie from hen and stag planning company Off Limits. And that isn’t even including flights nor, presumably, any cash you might leave behind on the blackjack table.
“They’re looking for bucket-list opportunities – we are in a different world now where people want that amazing picture to go on their social media,” says Currie. “People are saying: we want to do something better than the last hen, we want to make it memorable and do something different that we’ve never done before.”
Weekends abroad are popular (Barcelona and Marbella are current favourites hits, Currie says). One friend recalls an eye-wateringly expensive trip to Greece where everyone was forced to wear matching £150 designer swimsuits. But it’s UK-based hens that can often be the more expensive option, partly thanks to this obsession with building a full roster of activities.
No longer content with a round of Mr and Mrs and a butler in the buff, bridesmaids are now expected to line up a whole range of entertainment. A theme is de rigueur – “festival” being among the most popular. One friend is currently in intense discussions on a bridesmaids WhatsApp group about how to get a Glastonbury-style sign with the bride’s name delivered to a glamping site in Lincolnshire. Another planned an entire Tudor-themed weekend, complete with (strangely) sumo wrestling suits hired for a play fight in the garden of the Airbnb.
Private chefs are having a moment, I’m told, as is life drawing. One friend recalls being forced to learn a choreographed routine to a Cher song which they were then filmed performing as if they were in a music video. Assault courses are popular (honestly, you couldn’t pay me to do a Tough Mudder any day of the week, let alone on a hen weekend). In Newcastle, you can now do a Squid Game-style survival-of-the-fittest game, which sounds pretty dreadful. Really, the sky’s the limit. One friend’s maid of honour had a couple of pomeranians shipped in from Essex for everyone to play with while they got over their hangovers on the Sunday morning. I’d rather that than the assault course, but I’m still not sure why I’m stumping up 20 quid to pet someone’s dog.
Lucy Gordon, a 33-year-old real estate consultant from London, recalls finding herself straddling a horse on a hen do even though she’s terrified of them. “The bride and her schoolfriends who organised it are really into horse riding. No one else was and in actual fact I’m terrified of horses. They sent out the list saying this is what we’re all doing, let us know if there’s anything you don’t want to be a part of. I said, I don’t want to do the horse riding particularly, so how much do I pay if I don’t want to do it? ‘No no, that’s the price, whether you do it or not.’ So I did it because I thought, well, I’ve paid for it.”
On another hen, Gordon remembers, in “deepest darkest Surrey”, half the girls ended up weeping after being strapped into zip wires at Go Ape. “We all hate heights [...] None of us would have ever voluntarily done it.”
Alice Barraclough, a 30-year-old writer who lives in London, has spent nearly £1,500 on hen dos already this year. Organising them, she says (however flattering it might be to be asked to be a bridesmaid), is where you really end up losing money. “I feel the pressure to put on the best weekend ever and I voluntarily throw in more money probably without even realising it. It’s ‘oh I’ve spent an extra £20 on bunting and balloons’ and ‘oh there goes a round of shots for everyone’, probably because it’s my responsibility to make sure everyone is having #thebesttime.”
They can be tyrannical things, hen dos. You risk offending people if you turn them down. But I must admit, after this year, I’m thinking of taking a leaf out of my friend Laura’s book and sending out my own press release stating I am no longer going to bow to this pressure to spend my Saturday mornings applying temporary tattoos to my forearm with the words “bride tribe” in rose gold. Then again, perhaps I'll just bide my time and get them all back when it's my turn.