Guest Transportation

Providing guest transportation is not required unless the venue is in BFE far away from the hotels.


If you offer a service, you are expected to cover the costs. What happens with guests who take their vehicles to the venue and leave them overnight by taking a shuttle back? Not everyone will utilize Ubers to get to the venue.
Many people rent vehicles when they get to the airport. Just because you or someone else doesn’t has no bearing on others.
For these and other questions you have for your guests, get on the phone with them now to work things out logistically. If you don’t have a phone number then email them.

I dont think its necessary at all. Why would it be? You're not forcing them to get a hotel room, nor are you forcing them to drink so much they can't drive themselves. Hell, you're not even forcing them to come in the first place lol. If they make all of those choices for themselves, they can find transportation for themselves as well.

Is it necessary? No. Is it appreciated? Yes, of course. No you can’t ask people to pay. Yes it’s weird if it’s only the end of the night (especially because a lot of venues don’t allow overnight parking). School busses are usually a cheaper alternative to a shuttle company.

I think you should provide a shuttle if most guests are from out of town.

Assuming your out of town guests are flying into a major airport, they'll have a 1h15m to 1h30m drive to the Sonoma area, which Lyft estimates to be $75-140 per trip. If I were a guest, I'd rent a car given that estimate alone - at that price point, I might as well rent a car for the whole weekend!

I do think it would be rude to offer transportation for a fee, and it's a little strange to only offer it at the end of the night (and you'd need to confirm with your venue that cars can be left there overnight).

Have you confirmed that your hotel blocks don't provide shuttles? You could also compare prices of renting transportation vs. creating Uber/Lyft codes - you can create a code for X number of uses, up to $Y per ride.

I don’t think it’s strictly necessary across the board but I do think it becomes more important depending on a variety of factors. For our wedding, it was a non negotiable. Most of our guests had traveled and even though many had cars available to them, our wedding was in a deeply suburban area which meant 2 things: dark windy roads, and no super close hotels. If it had been a straight shot: 5-10 minutes up the major road to the blocked hotel , I wouldn’t have minded skipping. But our hotels were 20-25 minutes away and a little bit more complicated to get to (a bit of back roads driving on the way), and very few of our guests were at all familiar with the area....and we specifically had a road in that was single lane traffic (on a two way street) that I figured was just asking for trouble. That didn’t add up for me from the get go, and I factored transportation in when pricing out the place from the start, but even then it was way more obnoxiously expensive than I thought hah. A good chunk of the budget, but an important one for us .


So, I think there’s a lot of factors across board to consider. As a guest I ALWAYS appreciate it. But it is a bit of an all or nothing deal (I don’t think one way transport makes any sense and I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask guests to pay). PP’s suggestion of looking into a school bus rental is a good one, actually the boys at my husband’s bachelor party ended up doing that because there were very few taxis available in the near by area!

Since most of your guests are coming in from out of town and you mentioned that it can sometimes be difficult or a long wait for Ubers/Lyfts in the area, I think it would nice to provide transportation to make it easier on your guests (though it's certainly not required, and you cannot ask them to pay). My advice would also be to look into school buses instead of shuttles since the hesitation seems to be budget