Edit: I apologize , I should have posted this in etiquette.
My fiancé and I reside in St. Louis but have chosen to get married in Milwaukee, WI in August. We have actually postponed twice because of Covid concerns, but we are proceeding with this date. Invitations just went out late last week, this part will be important later.
100% of our guests will be traveling to our wedding. Despite being only about a 5 1/2 hour drive, almost none of our guests from the STL region have been to Milwaukee and are totally unfamiliar. Plenty will be coming by plane as my fiancé is from the KC region, and we both have lots of friends in other parts of the country. I understand wedding etiquette suggests reserving a hotel room block, so I made those arrangements back in September. The hotel reserved 20 rooms (we will need more like 40) but told me once they were full they could add another block of 10 or 20, depending on what I thought we needed. Sounded great to me at the time. Even better was the $115 group rate since I had booked this hotel before for $250+. Keep in mind this was during the fall, COVID was certainly part of that great price.
Fast forward to yesterday - I contact the hotel to see how many rooms are left on my block and confirm we can add more. We only have a couple left, I guess people are already booking, which is awesome. But they informed me they do not have enough availability to even offer me another block of 10. I'm super irritated by this, mainly bc I saw they are charging $374/night for that same weekend without the group rate. I cannot tell my guests to spend that for 1 night, let alone more. I spend a good chunk of time yesterday looking at hotels in the same general downtown area - no one has availability for 10 or 20 rooms that weekend. I used the wedding wire feature to request room blocks but haven't gotten a single response yet.
In the event that I cannot obtain another block, what do you suggest I do? I have my wedding website hosted elsewhere, and I required my guests RSVP there so they would have all of the lodging information too. Do you think I should just find a couple of hotels I think are nice and in a safe area, and post those on my website as suggestions? I want to make this easy on my guests, but I also want to eliminate a lot of repetitive calls/texts that both myself and my mother will surely get for folks wanting help.
