Unwanted British Tourists

What do you get if you combine Britain’s cultures of drinking and violence, its troublesome youth and the recent boom in budget airlines? This unpleasant mixture makes up what is rapidly turning into our country’s most unpopular export: the ‘lads holiday’.

Anyone who had tried to spend a peaceful weekend in the historical cities of Central and Eastern Europe will be familiar with the single-sex groups of young Brits who invade these locations for a few days of drunkenness and debauchery. The absolute requisites for this type of holiday include matching t-shirts printed with numbers and some kind of ‘laddish’ nickname across the back, excessive quantities of alcohol and at least one cultural excursion to a local strip club. While such holidays are nothing new, often undertaken as a stag or hen weekend before marriage, traditionally they would take place in less exotic British locations such as Blackpool. The proliferation in recent years of budget airlines such as easyJet and RyanAir though has made it easy and affordable to take these trips in warmer climes such as Greece or Spain or in cities in Central and Eastern Europe which would previously never have been on the radar of young revellers. A whole host of tour operators organise stag and hen weekends in places such as Krakow, Prague and Budapest, offering to help arrange trips to local bars and strip clubs or more active pursuits such as paintballing or go-karting.

These groups of spendthrift youngsters from Britain were initially welcomed by eastern cities keen to boost their economies and prepared to ignore the trouble they often brought. But the continuing improvement in the economies of the region, boosted by EU entry in 2004, plus complaints from angry locals has meant that many governments are now less prepared to accept the hedonistic excesses of British travellers. It is not uncommon for these groups to be involved in fights with locals or each other, and their presence has often induced a boom in sex-related industries that are not popular with residents of many cities.

The most recent example of this comes from Riga, the capital of Latvia and a popular destination for British stag groups. The British embassy there has warned travellers about strip clubs which entice men in with the offer of free drinks but then physically prevent them from leaving until they have settled an enormous bill which they have allegedly accumulated. One victim warned of how he and his friends were attacked and forced to hand over £3,000 ($5,850) in one strip club. He told the BBC: ‘It’s pretty frightening when you see one of your friends punched in the stomach and another one carted off into a room and you don’t know what’s happening to them...I don’t think I deserved it. How can you justify being beaten up for a drink? It just doesn’t make any sense.’ Strip bar owners in the city have responded by accusing Brits of initiating much of the violence, while earlier this year a Latvian MP, Oskars Kastens, labelled the British tourists as ‘savages’.

This appears to be a problem that isn’t going to disappear quickly and which will not be easy to solve. Of course British authorities have no jurisdiction abroad and simply warning tourists to behave themselves when they go away has not proved an effective solution. The combination of alcohol, violence, cultural unawareness and the language barrier means that many of those on these types of holidays are bound to get themselves in trouble. Equally it means that innocent holidaymakers are more likely to be branded as problematic and face a backlash from cities which are growing tired of Brits abroad. Better cooperation by the British police with forces abroad would seem like a welcome first step and perhaps a database recording known troublemakers and prohibiting them from travelling to certain destinations would prevent some problems (both these tactics have proved successful in controlling Britain’s football hooligans).