Hotel block or not??

There’s a two types of hotel blocks.


A courtesy block: the hotel agrees to block a group of rooms at a set rate for your guests to book (typically these max between 10 and 20 depending on the season. The hotel does this as a courtesy to you and there are no fees or obligations on your part.

A block with a attrition clause: if you need a lot of rooms you may find yourself facing a attrition clause where the hotel reserves a group of rooms at a set rate and you commit to filling a percentage of those room. If you don't fill them you owe the hotel money (unless you have a ton of out of town guests in a very popular area, its best to avoid these, a courtesy block should be plenty).

With both of these guests book via a dedicated link or by calling the hotel and mentioning the name of your room block.

Sometime, like for a destination wedding, the bride and groom.may lay for guests rooms but that's a whole other thing!

Hope that helps

Complimentary Room Blocks are free to you, it guarantees a certain number of rooms will be held for a discounted price for your guests. Unless you have an extravagant destination wedding budget you do not need to pay for rooms for your guests. You can just put some local places on your website for your guests to get ideas but many people have their own taste and budget for hotels.

Call hotels and see if they offer a courtesy block then you won’t be on the hook for paying for any rooms. None of the hotels in my area offered a courtesy block so we ended up not doing room blocks for that reason.

It depends on the hotel company. We have two complimentary blocks, one through Marriott and one through Wyndham. One is cheaper (we wanted two options for guests). Since they are "complimentary blocks", we aren't responsible for any unbooked room. Guests have until a certain date to reserve the room at our special rate, and after that date the rooms are put back into regular booking through the hotel. Some hotels require you to pay for unbooked rooms, but I'd just avoid working with those hotels.

View Quoted Comment Beat me to it! Worth noting that courtesy blocks are often essentially just a special rate and the hotels aren’t necessarily guaranteeing the rooms (the hotel could theoretically still sell out) whereas the ones with the attrition clauses usually actually hold the rooms open for your guests (hence why you would need to pay in the event of un-filled rooms in your block) . Also worth noting that the types are usually dependent on the hotel chain or the area (which is to say most hotels aren’t really giving you a choice, it just is what it is there).

i typically don’t recommend anything other than a courtesy block *unless* there’s some extenuating circumstances (you know you have many guests traveling and it’s the only hotel in the area, or some particular event coinciding with your wedding that is making rooms hard to come by). But in most cases a courtesy block is perfectly adequate and you don’t have to stress if enough rooms are getting booked ! If the hotels in your area only do blocks that you’d have to pay for unbooked rooms, you can always forgo a block and just point your guests towards specific hotels. No discounted rate then, but to be honest, I had a LOT of guests booking the hotel that we had a block at, but, outside of our block— they just found better rates online buying in advance or being members of the particular chain’s rewards program, so opted not to use our discount code (and thus didn’t count towards our block— so good thing we weren’t on the hook for a percentage of the blocked rooms!!)

I'm not doing hotel blocks.

View Quoted Comment I was told differently! We found one hotel that did a rate agreement which guaranteed the rate but not the room so guests still needed to book early. I thought a courtesy block was they held them till like 6 weeks before the wedding then released them to the public. I live in a city where courtesy blocks don’t exist though so this part of wedding planning was a pain for me haha.

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Thank you! It has def. helped

View Quoted Comment Lol, I went back to look at all our stuff to verify how our hotel did it. My husband handled this part. It was all via email and he called it a block repeatedly and the woman never clarified otherwise, and on our contract it said “These rooms are not held, but offered at discounted rates, based on availability” ... and now I am cracking up, because there’s a later exchange much closer to our wedding where he asked to increase the number of rooms for the night before our wedding as our “block” was filling up as we had more people than anticipated traveling early. And she indicated that rooms were filling up but she added a couple more of a certain time of room for us, and he responded “I want to be clear here. Are we at risk of losing rooms in our block? I thought we were locked in for a certain number of rooms up to a certain date?” ....well lo and behold, her response 2 months before the wedding and at least 6 months after they’re original exchanges she said for the first time “We do not block or guarantee rooms, but offer discounted group rates” lolol....turns out we never had a block afterall hahaha we had a group rate agreement. She hadn’t mentioned it before so I never noticed the distinction, and now I’m cracking up because I never realized this before. So, you’re totally right , anddddd....it turns out I never had a block! Lol (H justcopied me on these emails so I hadn’t actually read through it all before to realize). I distinctly remember asking him about a “courtesy” block specifically and he just said they didn’t call it that to him and he went back and verified we weren’t on the hook for anything financially. Hahaha

So uhhh, jk to the OP, but I guess a “rate agreement” is an alternative option!

We have a courtesy block through Marriott. They reserved 30 rooms for us at a discounted rate and will release those rooms a month before the event date. We are under no obligation for the unfilled rooms. They also gave me free info cards to include in my invitation suite so I didn't have to add that extra expense.

The hotel we made a block with let us reserve 10 rooms free of charge with no contingency. Two months out they would release the rooms unless we put a card on file to keep reserving them but even then we could cancel a week out free of charge. This seemed very fair to me! I’d never commit to buying rooms if they aren’t booked by other people!

A room block is a courtesy. Usually the hotel will offer a discounted rate which is nice. Depending on the number of rooms booked you may get your room even more discounted or even free. Every hotel is different so make sure to ask questions. Some will block an initial 10 rooms or so and once those are full they will add more rooms at the agreed upon rate until a certain date. Sometimes its 2 months ahead, sometimes 2 weeks, other places will try to accommodate up to the day of if they have rooms available.

Most places will hold you responsible for at least booking 50% of the rooms (so 5 rooms if they hold 10) and if you don't fill at least 5 rooms you would have to cover the difference. Some places hold you responsible for that percentage for each extension as well, others only hold you responsible for the percentage of original block rooms.

Some places will also offer shuttle service (depending on how far your venue is) if you block rooms. Some are a set number of runs, some are based on the number of rooms. Be sure its enough runs if they do it by rooms. One place we looked at did 1 run there and back for every 10 rooms booked, which would be 20 people but the shuttle only held 14.

YOU ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE TO PAY FOR ROOMS FOR YOUR GUESTS. Please don't think you are. People traveling or wanting to stay the night understand that these costs come with attending a wedding. If you can afford it, of course it would be a nice gesture, but there is absolutely no obligation to do so. My parents are paying for my grandma and a couple other guests of their choice, but it's not something that they would advertise or something any other guest would know about.