I am having both my ceremony and reception at the same location, which is an upscale hotel in the downtown area of a city. Hotel only offers valet parking, unless the guest would like to self-park at a nearby lot. I have reffered guests to the nearby lots via my wedding website, and listed the prices $15-30). Sadly, my hotel has upped the cost of valet parking since we booked the venue a year ago. Our wedding is 1 month away ...parking will now be $35-46 depending on what time the guest departs. Is it rude to leave guests with that cost? Should we attempt to cover a portion of it? There is no way we can add the total parking cost into our budget at this point.
Re: do i have to pay for guest parking?
I know someone that went to a wedding where all the parking was paid parking. In the invite the couple included a special parking pass for the guest to present to the parking attendent. The couple paid for the parking based on the number of parking passes that were turned in. Not sure if they were able to get a discounted rate due to the number of cars that they brought into the lot, but I would hope that a business would offer a discounted rate.
If you are not able to afford the full cost for each guest, see if you can arrange to pay a part. You could do something similar to above. Provide each person with a parking pass with the price on it that they will have to pay, say $10, they present that to parking attendant with their $10, and you pay the difference on the passes that were turned in.
It's not in your contract is it? Something like this should be honored at the rate of the time of your contract. But that would need to be spelled out in your contract.
Are guests also spending the night at the hotel? If I was a guest in this case and also staying overnight at the hotel I would not necessarily expect the couple to pickup my parking. If I am coming specifically for the wedding and nothing else, I would not be overly happy to pay my own parking rates at such a high fee.
Whenever I go to a wedding or other event in a downtown location I always expect to pay for my own parking.
If you can fit it in your budget great, but I would not side eye having to pay to park (but that valet price is crazy).
Fwiw, when we were looking at venues, one would have required valet since there was not a lot of nearby parking and we accounted for that cost on our due diligence breakdown for venues.
Thanks so much for all of the advice! We are going to try to work with the hotel to add a few items to our event, in exchange for lower parking rates (to at least make it comparable to the other local lots). That seems like the best win-win here. Our wedding is in the Seaport area of downtown Boston which actually wasn't as popular a year or two ago when we booked the wedding, so prices have unexpectedly skyrocketted. Luckily we were able to keep room prices down - our negitiated rate is like half of what they now charge for a guest room - but they will not honor the old parking rates as the valet parking company is seperate from the actual hotel.
Thanks again!