I am getting married next summer in a town in Iowa. My mom and I went to the hotel in the town where we are having our reception to block off rooms for guests. 75% of our guest list is coming from out of town so we wanted to start with 20 rooms. The hotel would not allow us to block off more than 10 rooms (we could count 10 rooms booked just with immediate family and out of town wedding party members). They said that up until a month before the wedding if guests call they will get the wedding discount depending on availablity. The reason we want to block off rooms is so there will be guaranteed rooms for our guests when our invitations go out. It was also important for us to have a room where we could have a brunch on the day after the wedding to open up gifts and say good bye to close family and friends. We were told that we could have a room but not until noon. This is an hour after check out which defeats our purpose. When this happened we decided to go to plan b.
Plan B:
We found more hotels that are a little bit further away. I called around to make sure we wouldn't run into the same problem and check to see how much the guest price would be. The first hotel had a 10% discount that left the guests paying 102. It is 11 minutes from the reception site. No other information was given over the phone. The second hotel had a 15% discount that left the guests paying 80-85. It is 17 minutes from the reception site. If we book more than 10 rooms then we get the meeting room for gift opening and a general gathering place. We also get a discount on whirlpool rooms from 140 to 99 bucks. They will allow us to block off more rooms if our original block fills up.
The problem:
My mom thinks that plan b hotel 1 is a better bet because she feels it is closer and easy to get to the reception site. My fiance and I think that hotel 2 is a better deal because of all the perks and they were a lot easier to work with over the phone than the other hotel.
We are at kind of a stand still on this because of the disagreement and I just wanted to get some other brides' advice on the matter and see what everyone else would choose. A) THe more expensive but probably more conveinent hotel to the reception or
The cheaper but a little bit further away hotel?