Open bar - pay per person or consumption?

Lucy - location location location. It's insane. Where we live a three bedroom house is always over 1/2 million. Same house in Cleveland: $150,000. Where is your wedding? It's in a few weeks!

The one venue I'm considering is a winery brewery that charges $5.75 per glass. The other charges what amounts to !24 per person for 4 hours open bar. I think it would even out because our guests would go to town at a open bar but not so much with wine and beer only.

I'm exactly the same as FutureMrsChang...and that was really good compared to other venues, so I'm pleased. Plus we're getting our table wine for free!

Brittany...um, what? That's your reason for having a cash bar? I'm personally against cash bars, especially if the bride and groom are drinkers; it's one thing if you just don't believe in it, it's another if you think others can't handle it as well as you can. It's not even a money thing? If you're worried about people drinking and driving, you should provide shuttles for them or have taxis waiting.

Robin - That IS insane. Yesss it's coming up! It's in San Antonio, Texas at a golf course/country club.

Ours is included in our venue fee... 4 hours of beer and wine at 12 a head.

Also at a new venue and took their off season time so I had a lot of sway when it came to negotiating prices.

We are doing open beer/wine for 4 hours...per person.

@Brittany that is where the bar staff takes control. The bartenders at my venue will cut people off if they become belligerent or if they become attached to the bar. If that is your only reasoning maybe that may work.

I love San Antonio. Ours is at a country club golf course too; but in Boston.

We are paying per person! The cost is included in the cost of the meal (our venue does the catering and bar, its all in one).

We had a drinking crowd so the per person rate made total sense for us. Consumption bar would have killed us. It was $35pp + wine was extra.

I have never heard of a bar at $80pp - that seems absolutely outrageous even for major cities / expensive cities.

We are paying for beer n soda I'm a bartender and everytime i see an open bar i just see full drinks everywhere cuz it's "free" and our venue only does cash bar per drink not per person that would ad up quick and im on a tight budget

Per person, and it's a bit ridiculous. We have to pay table prices for wine (as in, what it would cost to order a bottle in the restaurant, instead of the $10-$15 less it would be if you bought it yourself). So one bottle of wine is almost $45. They figured three per table.

Then for all other booze we're doing a flat rate of $4 and we cover the rest. Even though we're only having 60 guests, we're going to end up paying at least $1500 for booze. If we did a full open bar it would be several thousand or more.

Hooray for living in Canada and paying crazy prices for booze! If we could pay $20 pp for an open bar I would be in heaven! Our venue only offered consumption and we couldn't bring in our own. So we didn't have many options.

Per person but the cost was included with our venue per person price!

We're paying by consumption by the glass because about half of our group doesn't drink. Otherwise, we would do hourly for sure, especially if you need to keep a close eye on your budget.

Ours is $10 per person for 1 hour during cocktail hour plus 4 hours into the reception. It pays for two beer options, soda, and wine. Any other drinks will be up to the individual to pay for.

Yeah, mine is crazy expensive, but like FutureMrsT it was actually a pretty good deal and we are also getting wine service for dinner, so that's like an hour off!

OP how many over 21? 80 is pretty steep but 90% of the time as a former bartender I recommend per person, as it's not uncommon for bars to ring up extra shit

One baby, one 20 year old and everyone else older. I'm going to list next to everyone's name my estimated drink qty and figure it out from there. Some people will only have one and 2-3 don't drink at all. Thanks for everyone's help!

We haven't decided for sure, but we are thinking of doing per person for the cocktail hour, and consumption based for the reception. We need to tally it up but it looks like per person would assume about 5-6 drinks per person, which we thought would be a lot since it doesn't include the cocktail hour, our champagne toast, or the one pour of wine we are doing at dinner.

We are paying by consumption. This is why, i have 113 guests (including me and FH), I have 21 kids under the age of 16 on that list, 20 adults are their parents so they won't drink (and most are from out of town and will either leave early or may not even bring their kids), about 10-15 seniors will only have one or two, if any.