Our main hotel block closed on Friday! We did two blocks. Our wedding is July 20th just outside of Denver, so both our blocked hotels are in Denver.
One was with Marriott and one was with Days Inn Wyndham. Both started as complimentary blocks, so 15 rooms at each hotel. We had a ton of out of town & out of state guests so I knew we needed a lot of rooms. We also recommended 2 other nice hotels on our website, but didn't have blocks there. Marriott was very accommodating and let us add rooms 5 at a time as our block filled at no cost to us as our block filled. If we wanted blocked rooms past 6/28, we would be responsible if they didn't book, but we didn't opt for that. We sent out the main block information with our save the dates (10 months in advance), had it on our website, and sent it with our invites (3 months in advance). Before our invites even went out, we had 18 rooms booked. After our block closed, we had 44 rooms booked. We upgraded to a suite, but we got the regular room value comped since we booked so many rooms.
Marriott has been great to work with. My representative switched 3 times, but I anticipated that with the hospitality industry. They were all responsive via email & helped with guest issues. Our only issue was guests calling to change/cancel reservations. Marriott's reservation department isn't US based, and on top of being on hold for a super long time, they aren't helpful with hotel blocks at all. I found the best way to deal with it was to have the guests tell me directly what they wanted, I emailed our hotel directly, and it was changed that way.
Our second block doesn't close until July 7, and it currently has no rooms booked. We anticipated that, it's not as nice of a hotel but we did want a cheaper option to be accommodating. This hotel was $80 for a king bed or $90 for two queens per night. Our main hotel was $119 per night. We had the option to include transportation to our venue & back in the room rate, and make it $169, but we opted not to do that because 1, we didn't want that cost on our guests and 2, we wanted guests to use our transportation even if they didn't stay in this hotel. Our rehearsal dinner is 5 minutes from our main block, and our hired guest transportation also leaves from the hotel.
I'm happy with both hotel brands, they were efficient to work with and very responsive via email & phone call! Our blocked rate was $119 and I blocked it 1 year ago. At that time, rates were $109 if you paid in advance, or $129 normally. Our rate included free cancellations up to 24 hours out and free wifi, and we can hand out guest bags to each guest for free upon check in, plus we got the added benefit of the comped regular room if we booked 15 rooms per night. I checked recently, and Wednesday & Thursday night rates are now in the $200s because a tech company rented out the hotel during the week. Friday & Saturday are $105. So guests for sure could get a cheaper rate (two opted for that, one paid $80 for a government rate and one paid with points) if they searched for it.
Our block was for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday & Saturday night. We booked 3 rooms Wednesday night, 14 rooms Thursday night, 32 rooms Friday night, and 44 rooms Saturday night.
Overall, I'm SUPER happy we did hotel blocks and so are our guests since most opted to use it. With 44 rooms blocked (plus two additional outside the block in the same hotel), that's almost all our guests if you assume 2 people per room. Our final RSVP is 125 including my fiance & me. I get annoyed when we go to weddings without hotel blocks, in an area we aren't familiar with so it was never an option for us. It's hard to invite someone to a town or state they've never been to, then expect them to pick a good hotel in proximity to your venue.
I hope this helps brides pondering the idea of a hotel block or two!
