Once a simple (often rowdy) night out with friends, bachelor and bachelorette parties have turned into lavish affairs more akin to luxury vacations, often requiring flights, accommodation, pre-booked activities — and even multiple, matching, on-theme outfits.
Brides and grooms-to-be are renting villas on Caribbean islands, chartering yachts and planning spa weekends at luxury wellness resorts frequented by movie stars.
Celebrities are leading the charge. Lauren Sánchez celebrated her bachelorette, ahead of her wedding to Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, with a slew of A-listers on a Parisian getaway. Selena Gomez hired a yacht and a mariachi band in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Friends of Taylor Swift are said to be planning multiple star-studded trips ahead of her wedding to Travis Kelce later this year.
As celebrations spiral into days-long trips, the average cost has jumped to $1,300 per person, an increase of $600 since 2019, according to data from wedding website, The Knot.
While supporting a friend at this milestone in their lives is important for many, the cost and required PTO days is putting them in a tough spot.
“If you’re friends with someone for a long time, you want to be there for them, you want to support them. You want to celebrate them,” Ashley Herman, a 28-year-old real estate broker, told The Independent. “But when it comes to these trips that are $1,000 or more to attend, you feel like you have to go. If you don’t, it would leave an uncomfortable feeling in your friendship.”
Herman has attended several bachelorette trips that required traveling out of state.
“People say, ‘You can say no’ if you don’t want to go on, or can’t afford these trips, but that weighs on a friendship as well,” she added.
Social media is increasing the pressure when it comes to weddings and surrounding events. Bachelorettes today are “increasingly personalized and activity-driven,” Esther Lee, editorial director of The Knot Worldwide, told The Independent.
“Gen Z is particularly clued into online trends, spurring the rise of aesthetics when it comes to the bachelor/bachelorette party and leading to highly stylized, themed itineraries,” Lee said.
Many brides opt for a themed weekend, or have a different theme each night, often requiring attendees to shell out even more money on outfits tailored to each.
Social media is awash with photos of Mamma Mia! themed bachelorette parties in Greece, or “Last Rodeo” bashes in Nashville.
“It’s a domino effect, where you start seeing more and more people doing that, and then it becomes the norm,” Herman said.
These celebrations have become “both Instagrammable and deeply meaningful,” as younger generations place a higher value on shared memories and quality time, according to Lee.
“While platforms like TikTok and Instagram certainly act as the vision board for these highly curated trips, the real driver is a craving for authentic connection,” she explained.
The shift in bachelor and bachelorette parties also highlights how Gen Z prioritizes these milestones “as non-negotiable investments in their personal relationships,” Lee added.
But wedding culture in 2026 divides opinions. In a viral TikTok, comedian Mike Mancusi declared: “Wedding culture has gotten completely out of hand, and it needs to be stopped.”
He went on: “It’s gotten to the point where I actively do not want to be in anybody’s wedding party ever again. First, you gotta go to the bachelor party, which by the way, is not a party. Now it’s just like you’re absconding to some random part of the country for six days and spending all the disposable income you made in the last six months.”
Mancusi, 35, told The Independent that his breaking point was a five-day bachelor party in Las Vegas, after which he decided he was done.
“Everything you do out there is designed…they know you’re on a bachelor party, it’s just like everything is designed to kind of suck you dry,” he said.
“I turned one down recently; they had planned a trip to Las Vegas. It was going to be four days. They wanted to go to Wrestlemania and the Sphere, and I was like, ‘I do not want to do any of those things,’” he said.
Mancusi is far from the only person grappling with these celebrations.
For Isabel Beck, a New York City-based content creator, seeing a wave of negative reactions on social media to lavish bachelorette parties was enough to make her reconsider her own trip.
The 27-year-old always thought she would do a big trip for her bachelorette party, envisioning a joint getaway with her fiance and their shared friend group.
She had even planned an itinerary and scoped out villas at the Costa de Campo resort in the Dominican Republic — but later scrapped the entire plan over fears that she was asking too much of her friends.
“We were going to rent a really big villa. It was going to be on the more expensive side, once we priced it out, because of airfare, the hotels and additional activities. It was going to end up being more than $1,000 per person,” Beck told The Independent.
“I was already feeling anxious about that, and I’ve been seeing all these TikToks about how bachelorette culture and wedding culture are so out of control,” she said. “I started to get in my head about the cost of it.”
Beck, who is planning a big wedding in the Hamptons later this year, said she will likely celebrate with a bachelorette party closer to home.
“I do think it’s important to treat your wedding party well and show them you appreciate them for the effort they’re making to be in your wedding,” she said. “But I don’t necessarily think you have to do a crazy, over-the-top trip, or give them an insane gift to show them that you love them and want them to have a good time.”
She added: “You see big creators doing these insane, over-the-top bachelorette parties. It kind of made me spiral, just because I feel like there is already so much that goes into wedding planning, it started to feel like it was more of a performative thing.”
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