Hi all. You all offer some great advice and I need some of that now. I need help deciding between two venues. My Fi says whichever I want is fine with him. This will be for a 2016 winter wedding in the mountains.
Venue A:
Ceremony and reception held in ballroom at main lodge (no gap). After the ceremony, guests will have cocktail hour in an adjoining room until the ceremony chairs are taken away and the reception tables and dancefloor are set up. After which, the doors will open and guests will walk through to the reception. The ballroom is very simple and will need some major decor. They usually use it for trade shows and whatnot. There are small windows throughout the room so you can see the ski slopes.
Sentimental -- this venue is very sentimental because we met there.
Activities -- it truly is a resort and there are a lot of activities for guests, such as skiing, showshoeing, snowboarding, tubing, heated outdoor pool.
Convenient once guests are there -- once the guests arrive, everything is in one place, if they choose to stay at the resort. If not, they have other hotels only minutes away to choose from. If they want to party (we're inviting a lot of 20-somethings), there are nightclubs and bars all along the strip and the hotel offers free shuttle service to and from these places.
Price -- this is a much cheaper venue, partly because of how simple the venue is and also because it's more inconvenient to get there. Which leads to a major con...
LESS convenient to get there -- we have a lot of out-of-town guests and there is a regional airport in the same town as the venue. The problem is, these are very small 6-passenger propeller planes, so I can see people being freaked out about that and deciding against this particular airport, especially given that it will be snowing this time of year. The closest major airport is a little over 2 hours away and when I say 2 hours, I mean that an hour of drive time will be on country roads. I worry about this for guests who aren't used to driving in snow.
Venue B:
BEAUTIFUL AND MORE ACCESSIBLE.
The ceremony will be held at the base of the mountain in a beautiful room in the lodge. Immediately after the ceremony (no gap), guests will board gondolas (tickets pre-paid by bride and groom as venue is only accessible by gondola) and head up to the top of the mountain for a mountaintop reception.
More convenient to get there -- closest major airport is only an hour away and it's all interstate driving. This is a big consideration because we know this will be more convenient for our guests, but there are a list of cons...
More expensive -- obviously, this option is much more expensive than Venue A. We can afford it, but who wants to spend money they don't have to spend?
Resort is spread out -- there isn't one base resort hotel. It's actually a string of hotels all up and down this strip, so family and friends will be split up most likely.
Activities specific to hotel they choose -- some of the hotels have some of the things mentioned for Venue A, but some are inns and beds and breakfasts, so they wouldn't have all those amenities.
I could get past the beauty of Venue B and choose A to save money, except for the fact that B really is much more convenient for our guests to get there. We thought about using the money we would save by going with A on a shuttle service to get them to the venue, but it comes out to actually be much more expensive than B if we offered that. So now we're stuck. What would you do?