Deposit for hotel?

Realtine

Can anyone give a rough estimate on how much are we likely to pay as a deposit for a hotel for our reception?
(Small civil ceremony about 50 people in August 2014).
We are looking a couple of places this week - are we too early?

When did folks start to seriously plan their wedding?

outnumbered82

Depends where your booking. If you really want the place on a certin date give anything then once it's officially booked and all the details finalised they will prob ask for 10% then the balance 6 weeks before the date. Or they will pre authorise your credit card and you can pay the balance. Another thing is they may not take a deposit just a credit card number and if you cancel after a certin date they will take a percentage of what the full wedding would cost as a cancelation fee

Howjoe1

as little as possible given economy & hotel closures.

pooch90

Our hotel are looking for between €1K-€1.5K (depending on package-all inclusive or price per head).
We wouldn't give this much unless the place is pretty stable (which is never really known nowadays)
We are August 2014 and just started looking in the past month.
We wanted a weekend date in the summer and most places are already fairly booked up in our area.
Also, everywhere we looked at had minimum numbers for weekend summer weddings.

It all depends on what you want though.

tatli_lokma

As others said, it depends, so you need to ask this as one of your questions when chosing a venue.

Also I would caution against paying the full and final amount before the actual wedding. If there are any disputes/issues, it is much harder to get your money back. I had a problem with my hotel about the bar bill (basically we had 3 open rounds rather than wine as a lot of my family wouldn't be great wine drinkers). The bill came as bar drink x 10, bar drink x5. Nothing itemised, just 'bar drink'. I would say 30%of our guests weren't drinking alcohol, 30% were beer/wine drinkers and at a max 30% were drinking spirits. The total just didn't add up - even if all our guests ordered double vodka and redbull it would have been cheaper. There was a difference of nearly €800 from what we expected it to be and what it was. So we refused to pay it unless they could itemise it and tell us exactly what we were paying for. We had a bit of aggro about it but because we hadn't paid everything already, we could just deduct the over payment from the final bill (we did pay for what we thought was a reasonable amount, based on 60% of the guests ordering beer/wine, 30% spirits and 10% on soft drinks, which was even more generous than it probably should have been given the make up of our guests, but we didn't want them to think we were just trying to get out of paying for it at all).

so don't pay everything in full - a) because there might be a dispute over costs and b) because the hotel might go into liquidation a month before your wedding and you will be snookered if they have all your money!

godtabh

pay the deposit with you CC. Do not pay cash. Gives your some guarantees

fondue

godtabh wrote: »

pay the deposit with you CC. Do not pay cash. Gives your some guarantees

We are looking at venues at the moment and I was reading the terms and conditions of one of them over the weekend and it says they do not accept credit cards as a deposit. And they also don't accept credit cards for the balance. I've never seen this before, just wondering if it's normal?

clint_silver

fondue wrote: »

We are looking at venues at the moment and I was reading the terms and conditions of one of them over the weekend and it says they do not accept credit cards as a deposit. And they also don't accept credit cards for the balance. I've never seen this before, just wondering if it's normal?

Ive said this a few times on here, companies that are tight on budgets will refuse credit cards due to the extra cost involved with dealing them. is it 1-2% traders fee? Ive come across a couple of vendors recently, not just wedding related, that will either not accept CC or will give a cash price and then a CC price which is slightly higher.
IMO, I dont think the acceptance or not of the CC is an indicator of how likely a business is likely to fail, ie, the 1-2% theyre saving might add up over a year for them but it wouldn't be the deciding factor if they were going under if you get me.

tatli_lokma

yes but if they did go under you would have a harder time to get your money back - at least with CC you have that security. I would rather pay an 'admin' fee to cover the cost of paying by CC rather than risk the place going bust and my money being swallowed.

clint_silver

Little Ted wrote: »

yes but if they did go under you would have a harder time to get your money back - at least with CC you have that security. I would rather pay an 'admin' fee to cover the cost of paying by CC rather than risk the place going bust and my money being swallowed.

While this is a true point, would that admin cost be more or less than wedding insurance which could be expanded to cover other things as well?

not withstanding any excess included with wedding insurance policies of course.

tatli_lokma

Well, if your wedding package at the hotel cost €10,000, a 1% cc admin fee is €100. That would be pretty much the excess on most policies. I have heard mixed reviews about the insurance policies TBH. Most things it covers could be covered by cc in the case of the business closing down, or travel insurance. Outside of those things, don't pay for anything in full until very close to the day and pay as little deposit as you can get away with. From some of the reviews I have heard, the wedding insurance wasn't worth that much when it came to it - very mixed experiences of it.

abrr1000

If you are going for a venue that only holds one wedding per day then you should pay earlier to book your date.
We paid for a similar size wedding 1k deposit this Feb for a wedding this June