Hi all, first poster here—but I can't seem to find a good solution to this, I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas; would be SO grateful!
In short, we're having our wedding in Marrakesh, and we've privatized 3 riads (basically like local-style B&Bs) for our guests to stay. Unfortunately, though, the way it works there is that when you privatize a riad, we have to pay in one lump sum—the guests cannot pay the riad directly, and we definitely cannot afford to cover everyone's rooms!
So we're looking for some sort of system/way to collect payment for rooms, but of course in a tactful way—we don't just want to ask guests to PayPal us/give us money directly, as that seems really tacky (even if we explain the situation, it's just awkward). To complicate matters further, another thing with riads is that every room is unique (and we have 23 available rooms total), and accordingly have different price points. For this, we can either feature the room details on our SquareSpace site (time consuming, but would be more convenient for guests), or we could direct guests to see the room details on the riads' own websites.
In sum, has anyone else ever dealt with something like this (particularly any form of needing to collect money from your guests tactfully), or otherwise have any other ideas? Again, I would be SO grateful for any thoughts you all might have! All the best,
Ashley
PS — So far, the only ideas we've come up with are these, but they each present some possible issues:
- SquareSpace/Stripe "business" payment: As noted above, we could do payment processing through our SquareSpace site, with each room listed as a sort of "product." But in this case, we'd need to keep a really close eye on each room as they're booked, and remove them from the site as soon as they're booked.
- PayPal/new "business" bank account/LLC: This would be a bit of a pain/kind of roundabout, but we could set up a little LLC (with some name like "Marrakesh Riad Bookings" or whatever), and direct payments through that. Seems a little deceptive, though we'd be open about it—again, it just feels tacky if we're asking people to send money to us personally.
- A real hotel booking system: This seems the hardest/maybe least affordable, but we could maybe find some sort of actual booking software/web tool. Kind of seems like overkill for this small purpose though!
PPS — One last complication: It would be *really* ideal if guests could put down a ~30% down payment (as we had to do with the riads already ourselves), and pay the final remainder closer to the wedding. Especially with some guests being potentially nervous about COVID/shelling out the full amount upfront, this would be really helpful (and help our cash flow situation for other wedding expenses!)... but again, this makes creating some sort of payment system even more complicated!