Weddingbee Blog

I might not have mentioned this before, but we’re having a destination wedding. Not to us, since Chicago is where we’ve called home for nearly three years, but it will be for 85% of the guest list. I grew up in Minnesota and went to college in D.C., my parents moved to California five years ago, and my family is scattered across six different countries. Mr. Bacon grew up in Illinois, Indiana, and Switzerland and has family across every U.S. time zone. Not to mention that the wedding party will be flying in from Boston, New York, Syria, and Brazil.

While we’re excited to share the city with our friends and family, we had to find a place for them to stay while they’re in town.  Our one-bedroom apartment simply wouldn’t cut it, so Mama Bacon and I set out calling and e-mailing what seemed like EVERY hotel in downtown Chicago, from Gold Coast to South Loop, for three weeks.  We assumed that room blocks would dry up pretty early due to the high volume of weddings in September, but we weren’t prepared for what we found. There are not one, but two huge conferences in town that weekend totaling more than 40,000 attendees! WHAT?!?

“Heartbreak Hotel” - Elvis

All of the major chains couldn’t really play ball because all their lowest rates were already booked by corporations, so we were getting back block-room rates double what we thought guests would be willing to pay. Even the Holiday Inn came back with rates in the $200–$275 range. Excuse me?? If your hotel is known for being affordable, I feel like rates higher than $200 are a bit absurd. It’s not like we were calling up Donald Trump and trying to get a deal at his hotel; we called everyone from the HoJo to the Hilton, and no one gave us good news. The worst part is that we went into all of this with a family friend who swore that (since he is some big wig at a luxury hotel in Boston) he could get us $99 rooms right off Michigan Avenue…Lies!

“Holidae Inn” - Ludacris, Chingy, and Snoop Dogg

So, I was freaking out. My mom was freaking out. Mr. Bacon was just trying to avoid me because I was more stressed about finding an economical hotel than I was about finding the right dress! Then we took a deep breath and began calling the boutique hotels. I spent every lunch break for a week checking out hotel after hotel, but I came to find out that “boutique” is often a synonym for small and “historic” is little more than a synonym for old. A number of hotels were willing to drop the rates on the condition that we would guarantee 90% of the blocked rooms. (If we blocked 30 rooms, we would guarantee 27, and if only 22 rooms were booked by guests, we had to foot the bill for the last five.) We simply couldn’t take that risk.

Then I found it. The Amalfi. It’s a newer hotel that occupies the lower six floors of the office building where Google’s Chicago office is housed, and it’s right above one of my favorite restaurants in the city, Keefer’s. (You’ve gotta try their prosciutto-wrapped asparagus…to die for…I digress.) I met with the sales manager and got a tour of their big rooms with huge picture windows, took a twirl in their bathrooms where at least three girls can get ready simultaneously, and was shown to lobbies where they serve a complimentary breakfast each morning and the area where they host a “manager’s cocktail hour” each evening with drinks and appetizers on the house. Then I got their rates, and I was sold. The crazy three weeks were over, and we finally had a place for our guests to stay.

How do you not go crazy the way I did? Here are some simple tips:

• Before booking your venue, check and see if there are any conferences or major events in town that weekend.
• If there are, moving your date might help you get a better price on the venue (and hotels).
• If you (like the two of us) are dead set on that date, book the venue and immediately start talking to hotels.
• We waited three months to start talking to hotels; if we hadn’t this never would have been an issue.
• Shop around: Don’t just check out the big chains—every city has at least a handful of boutique hotels that aren’t a consideration for conference-goers.
• Don’t forget to keep distance from rehearsal dinner, ceremony, and reception sites in mind. Out-of-towners will probably get lost if the hotel is far away!
• Check the contract for room guarantees, costs to deliver out-of-town bags, etc. Those things add up!
• Ask about getting free rooms for the bride and groom and parents. Lots of places are open to this if a certain number of rooms are booked.
• If you can’t get prices as low as you’d like, talk to your guests and see what they are willing to pay—it might be higher than you’d expect.