Hiring out whole wedding venue – accommodation question

[IHeartHoumous]

Hi there,

Newly engaged here! Making (baby step) moves with the wedding planning.

For their wedding day friends of ours hired out a whole venue including the xx number of rooms; a couple of days before the wedding they asked if we’d like one of the rooms for a knock down price as they hadn’t all been booked – we declined as we’d already booked and paid upfront for accommodation elsewhere, in the end one of the guests who lived round the corner from the venue stayed the night of the wedding as the room hadn’t been booked so would have been empty but paid for.

I just wondered how this works payment wise? Do you pay for the whole venue and then if others book rooms (by a certain date i.e. before the final amount is due before the ‘big day’) this amount is subtracted from the final bill?

I believe in their case they had no choice but to hire out the venue as a whole – there wasn’t a huge number of rooms but the majority of guests lived locally so didn’t need accommodation on the night. We had to come the night before so booked a Jurys Inn – had a look at staying at the venue for 2 nights when we got the invite and it would have been £400+

I think it depends on the venue - a couple I looked at, you hired the venue and in doing so committed to booking x number of rooms. These had to be paid for separately to the hire, and if guests didn't book them we would have to pay for them.

If it's a case of rooms being included in the hire price then just be clear with the venue what the rooms should be charged at as you don't want to come across to guests as them subbing your venue hire.

Congrats on the engagement by the way!

Congratulations! As above really. We had our venue (we have changed it now) and then committed to booking out rooms at a cost of £1200. That was 10 rooms I think, and had to be paid for regardless if people wanted them or not. We then had to decide if we charged the 'going rate' or cheaper and made up the shortfall.