This is long, sorry.
When we originally picked our venue, we told them we would have between 100 and 135 guests. On our contract they wrote 100, but told us it didn't matter what number they wrote there; that it was just an estimate.
This past weekend we scheduled another appointment to go down there to ask some more questions and get some pictures of the reception and ceremony location for planning purposes. Well, our event coordinator was not working that day, so he scheduled us a meeting with a different person there. The first thing this new person asked us was how many guests we were planning on. We said "between 100 and 135." She then told us that the location of our reception could only accommodate a maximum of 100, and if we went over that number then we needed to reserve the ballroom instead.
I asked a lot of questions about this because we very specifically told our coordinator that we could have up to 135 and he never mentioned anything about the possibility of needing to change the location if we reached that many. Apparently it's just being chalked up to miscommunication between all of us...... okay. So we go look at the ballroom, and it's nice (though it really does change everything we had planned with the location of the other room), and she tells us that we can still hold our original room, just in case we have less than 100, but that we should book the ballroom too until we get our final numbers. That works out great because since we put our deposit down, they require absolutely nothing else until 3 days before (obviously we'll pay more before then, but I think this is cool).
Well, on Monday FI gets a call from our original coordinator and he apologizes about the "miscommunication." But then he also proceeds to tell my FI that if we book the ballroom, our food and beverage minimum will change from $3,750 to $10,000! What?! Um, there is no way we will ever reach that with 135 people at $50/person. FI told him that he needs to work with us and get back to us with the absolutely lowest he could go on that number. He said he might be able to figure something out because we're getting married in a slow season.
FI and I have talked, and the highest we're willing to go is $7,500.
I know our contract says 100, but we asked about that and they promised us it was just an estimate and it didn't matter... And at no time did they ever say anything about needing to change the location if we had more people, when we were very upfront about the possibility of having more than 100.
I guess my question is, how could we have avoided this? Did we do something wrong, or did the venue?
