Weddingbee Blog

Out of town guests are going to make up about 50% of our guest list, so Mr. C and I are brainstorming ways of getting them from their hotels to the reception site or vice versa. Though we’re having the ceremony and reception at the same venue, we want to provide our guests with a way to get there since many of them may not be that fluent in English and most family members will be preoccupied with wedding events so it’ll be difficult to coordinate rides. Plus, we know we’ve got a bunch of heavy party-ers among the crowd, so we want to make sure everyone gets home safe.

What’s an effective, yet fun way to transport our guests? I was inspired while strolling around Manhattan…

I would never pay for a tour on one of these any other day, but for my guests, it’d be a quintessential New York experience and for the cheese-phobes, they could just blame it on the bride and groom. Right now, I’m imagining our drunk friends from college hanging off the top railings… yikes!

My research led me to Gray Line Bus Tours (which Miss Peony recently mentioned here). Their site even has a section for weddings (which I’m always wary of because I think they’ll charge more). I called instead of emailing and got rates. It would cost about $800 per transfer, so roundtrip it would be about $1600. Whoa…

But the good part is that it can seat up to 82 people which would be great… except if it rains, it can only seat 29/standing 15 downstairs. And they can’t guarantee a secondary bus. So for the price Mr. C and I are going to have to really explore other options. They also have a trolley in the fleet, but that would seat only 28 people and cost about $600 per transfer. At that rate, I’d rather get the double decker and hope that it doesn’t rain!

We don’t want to resort to the standard coach bus, but for the sake of efficiency, we may have to. 

How did you get your guests to your wedding?