Wording to have guests stay at your resort

Hi Ladies! My FI and I need a little help!! We are worried about having a lot of guests deciding to stay off of the resort where the wedding will be (our guest list is ~80 people). There is an extra fee ($99 per person at Dreams Cancun) that we must pay for all off site guests to attend the wedding. That obviously can add up quickly and a big part of why we are doing a destination wedding is because we want to have the extra few days to hang out with our closest friends and family and to have them get to know each other.

So we are looking for suggestion on how to word the invitations to promote staying at our resort. Also any other suggestions on helping persuade guests to stay with us at Dreams would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks so much!

Kristin

I think this may be a little difficult to get across on the invitations, but if you have a website or an insert in the invitations you could get this across.
On my website, I said "Our goal is to have all of our guests in one location so we can enjoy eachother's company during the days leading up to and after the wedding. Feel free to make a vacation out of our wedding and stay for as little or long as you want!"
I also said "We have found the all-inclusive route to be very economical while vacationing. We would love all of our guests to stay at Dreams with us, but the resort is booked to capacity all year round and will probably be full by December 1st for our wedding in May. Please reserve your room as soon as possible! If you are unable to get a room at Dreams, or would prefer to stay at another property, please contact us or our travel agent and we will assist you in making those arrangements." I was hoping this would create a little sense of urgency that they needed to book their rooms sooner rather than later. So far, it hasn't helped, but as many other brides have reminded me, I probably won't get people booking rooms until the last possible second.

AHA! Kristin, this truly is the $600,000 question! I think Sarah gave some great advice, but be prepared to have people do what they are going to do - it may not be what you want them to do. Don't even get me started...

HOLLY CRAP.. I just noticed how many points you and Sarah have now.. My God ladies you must be winning like crazy in the lotto.. lol

Teee heee! I know, when I signed in the other day I was flabbergasted at how many points I had - I guess I won the weekly lotto jackpot. WOOHOO!

now go buy us some things!

hehe- yup the lotto has turned into the Christa & Sarah show the last few days...

i know this is totally rude but i told my guests that there were responisble for the daily fee if they choose to stay somewhere else. this is what it says on our website- we havent done invites yet but the wording will be pretty similar:

"We are staying at Dreams Los Cabos- All Inclusive Resort. Please try to stay at this resort if possible to avoid extra "daily pass" fees. If you choose to stay at a different location you will be responsible for the $85 fee. Thank You!"

i know- sort of rude- but we CAN NOT afford to cover everyone- once we have a better idea of the number of people who are staying off site and once we are closer and see if we have extra money in the budget- we may offer to cover the cost- but we will have to see how things turn out.

I think Sarah is right. You can suggest it, but ultimately these folks are going a long way to watch you get married and hopefully take a nice vacation as well. So if they choose to stay elsewhere you just have to deal with it.

i agree with sarah and tasha...

 

even though we did not want guests to stay elsewhere, we were ready to bite the bullet and pay for those that did not stay at our resort...

 

BUT one of the reasons we chose the resort we did was because it was a good deal and not so expensive so there was no reason for guests to want to stay elsewhere.

 

we did have about 8-10 that stayed offsite but mainly because they did not book in time to get the room block or they had a timeshare...one guy even camped out on the beach.