Sonal J. Shah Event Consultants, LLC

What To Look For When You Are Doing A Group Reservation

When it comes to reservations for your wedding, there are quite a few. You need to reserve a venue, decorator, caterer, florist, and several others. But one reservation that is key to any wedding is the Group Room Reservation. Having a place for your guests to all stay, together, and for one price, often is a plus. So what do you look for when creating your Group Room Reservation?

Cut Off Date

The cut off date creates the amount of rooms in your group reservation to be available for a certain amount of time, for a special price (normally up until 30 days before your wedding date). Check the cut off date very carefully on your rooms contract.

Attrition

Attrition fees are applied when a group cannot fill at least 80%, or an otherwise agreed upon percentage, of the contracted number of rooms. Attrition fees are compensation to the hotel for the rooms that might have been sold had they not been removed from the market by contract. So, make sure you know what the attrition amount is for your block. (If you reserved 50 rooms for Fri and 50 rooms for Sat, then an 80% attrition means you are obligated by contract to pick up at least 80 rooms over those two nights)

Room types

When reading your rooms contract, make sure you know what room type you are booking. For example if the contract says "Run of House", this means it is the basic room type. So, if you think you are reserving Ocean view, or river view or lake view, this is not the case. Most of the premium rooms do not go into a rooms contract so pay attention to this.

Bed Size

Under a rooms contract, make sure the hotel has listed what bed types are being offered to the guest. You may want to tell them we need 25 king beds and 25 two double beds for each night so this is 50 rooms total but 25 in each category. Don't assume that just because you booked 50 rooms, all 50 will have two double beds.

Special Requests:

Before you sign a rooms contract make sure you are aware of the hotel's policies. This includes check in time, check out time, how many guests per room, are cots allowed, are cribs allowed, can one family member be on the same floor or next to another. Just because your guests arrive at 8am to check in does not mean the hotel will have a room ready if the contract states check in time of 3pm.

The moral of the story is to READ EVERYTHING CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU SIGN.