Blocking out Hotel Rooms

We found hotels that let you reserve the rooms under your wedding's name until about a month out (courtesy block) and add more as the rooms begin to fill up. This was free to do and they do not charge for unused rooms. I would start with enough to cover half since airbnb's are popular now!

I agree with all the PPs above about doing the courtesy block in a couple hotels with their standard number of rooms (usually 10-15), and adding as needed. Courtesy blocks do not require a deposit. If you can't find a fitting hotel near your venue that offers courtesy blocks, you could just give hotel recommendations through your wedding website so your guests have at least an idea of a nice hotel that's near your venue but you're not financially tied down to the block. We might do one block and then a few recommendations and let everyone just figure it out on their own (most of our guests travel regularly and have hotel loyalties anyway).

Another good tip for transportation to/from your reception is that some hotels will offer a discounted or free shuttle service for the guests in your hotel block. It's worth asking!

I didn't end up using their services as I went with a hotel I had contacted directly, but Kleinfeld (yes, the dress store) offers a room block service for free. Someone will contact all the hotels in a certain area (or the ones you want to be contacted) and give you a spreadsheet of rates and other things to know about the block (do they provide brunch? shuttle? etc). It was kind of nice to have the service do all the legwork. I would have gone with one of their options but they didn't come back with a rate for the hotel I was hoping to go with.

I called area hotels and asked for a "courtesy room block". I'm not on the hook for anything. The rooms release about 3 weeks before the wedding so if they haven't booked by then, they won't get the locked in rate for the wedding.

They are also giving us a complimentary suite for the night of (we are using it for the night before).

We invited 225 guests (from all over the country & a few overseas) which included full families and plus ones. Our total guest count at our wedding was 125. Out of the 125 guests, about 110 stayed at our blocked hotel because it was about an hour or more from basically all our guests. We did two hotel blocks, one cheaper through Days Inn for $80 a night (pet friendly too) and one nicer through Marriott for $120 a night (where we stayed with our families). No one stayed at our cheaper hotel but it was nice to have the option I thought. I liked Marriott because we started with a complimentary 15 room block for Thursday, Friday & Saturday night (Saturday evening wedding) then they let us add rooms 5 at a time as the block filled at the same rate as long as rooms were available in the hotel. No deposit. We ended up with 15 rooms Thursday, 25 rooms Friday, and 45 rooms Saturday. So for Friday & Saturday, our hotel room was comped. They also handed out out our welcome bags for free. Since we had so many out of state guests, we sent our save the dates out 10 months in advance with a small business card sized insert about our main hotel block. That helped a lot of guests planning on flying in. Before our invites went out, we already had rooms booked in our block.