Everything you need to know about
Destination Wedding Room Blocks
What is the benefit of having a room block?
Many resorts will request or even require that you have a “Room Block” booked alongside your wedding date. This is to ensure that there are enough rooms available for your guests at your destination wedding event. In many cases we see online room rates rise with time and rooms or certain categories can sell out far in advance, so having a room block is an important part of the process as it “holds” the rates in place and also the room inventory, ensuring a stress free planning experience for everyone involved! It also allows your guests to place a small deposit to secure their room and pay it off later on as opposed to having to pay in full up front for their entire room. Many resorts offer promotions or concessions alongside your room block, for example in the form of comped rooms that are awarded as a (often significant) cash credit, complimentary private events or comped wedding packages. We often see our couples earn thousands of dollars in promotions via their room block that they would otherwise not have access to.
How does the room block deposit work?
Resorts require an initial deposit from the wedding couple to secure their room block. The size of the deposit will vary depending on the resort and number of rooms, but in general you can expect many resorts to request $100 per room for an *average size wedding. For example, if you would like to carve out an initial room block for 20 rooms, the initial downpayment would be $2,000. With this, the wedding couple receives one room for themselves and 19 rooms for their guests. The wedding couple will select their personal room category, travel dates and optional travel insurance and they will receive an invoice showing their deposit and remaining balance on their room if there is one. If the cost of the deposit exceeds the cost of their own room, they can either opt to have the overage refunded to them after the room block is complete (usually in the few months leading up to travel) or they can apply their deposit to family member or friend's rooms.
How do the guest deposits work?
Guests will then have their own deposit to place in order to secure their room. For an average size wedding, the guest deposit is typically $100-$200 per person depending on the resort. We always try to make the guest deposit amount and terms as friendly as possible to encourage them to secure their room early on. The final payment date for all rooms is typically 3-4 months pre-travel, again depending on the resort and size of the group.
Does the wedding couple get charged for unused rooms?
The short answer is that with Coral Tide Travel as your travel agency, you will not be charged for unused rooms. This means that if you block 30 rooms, but only use 20 then you will not be liable for the 10 unallocated rooms. You are contracting us to manage your room block, and we work within the hotel’s attrition dates, dropping unused rooms before the date of penalization. In the event that a guest(s) is not able to pay for their room, that room will be released back to the resort prior to any attrition deadlines in your room block contract. However, it is important to note that if you book a room block directly through the resort or with certain travel agents, they might not assume this responsibility and therefore it is not uncommon to see other couples (not Coral Tide couples) who end up footing the bill for unpaid rooms in their room block contract.
What is the minimum number of rooms to form a group booking/room block?
Depending on the resort and seasonality, there is typically a minimum of 10 rooms to form a room block. If you drop below the minimum number of rooms by the deposit date and the hotel will not allow us an exception to finalize the room block, we would cancel the group booking and re-book you and your guests as individual travellers. Please note you may be subject to different rates/ inventory and you would lose your room/ flight comps in this scenario. Ensuring that you have a minimum of ten rooms booking within your room block is imperative.
Managing your room block
Booking a wedding group vs booking individual travel
In rare circumstances we come across guests who question the room block. This is totally understandable given the way that travel is booked nowadays! Your guest might say “What, you booked with a travel agent! Are we in the 1980s? Why wouldn’t we all just book on Expedia?” While your guest means well, they have probably only ever booked trips for themselves and their immediate family where one can simply pop online to see what deals are available. But this is not a 4-person holiday, this is a destination wedding which requires many rooms and there is no flexibility with regards to the resort and dates. Resorts do not have an infinite amount of rooms and it’s very common for them to book to capacity. We particularly see the destination wedding niche hotels book to capacity very early because wedding couples are blocking off large amounts of rooms at once, thereby reducing the overall inventory. For this reason, it’s recommended and oftentimes required for couples to book a room block alongside their wedding date to ensure that their guests will have a room for their wedding day.
External Websites
Resorts can sell off remnant rooms quickly online through external booking engines to individual guests. The rates you see on these types of websites are typically for remnant rooms (ie. no more than 5 rooms available at that rate). For example, if you have a group requiring 30 rooms, perhaps the first 5 rooms will be able to book online through the external site, but the remaining 25 rooms will face the rate hike for the now premium priced rooms in the next section that they are selling, or worse they could be sold out by the time your remaining guests try to book.
Your room block will allow you to have a contract directly through your wedding resort, whereas bookings made on external websites are contracted through that website. If the resort over sells their capacity, your room block is premium and guaranteed inventory; whereas bookings made on external websites face being walked to a sister property if there is no room for them (yes, we have seen this happen to guests who book externally!). Guests who book through external websites do not count towards complimentary events, room comps or wedding package comps for the wedding couple.
Price Matching
External websites can be difficult to price match because they are not affiliated with the resort. They will often change their rates based on how many rooms they have to "sell off". Oftentimes the price will rise if you leave the website and return a week, a day or even an hour later. They will usually have just a few rooms at the lower “teaser” rates (online engines have a limit of 5 rooms). The resort's website is a much better benchmark to see "how good" your group rates are. If the resort actually does have a sale, their website rates would go down and provide us with proof for a price match. We would then take a screenshot of the resort’s website including dates, hotel, URL, timestamp of your computer and send the screenshot over to the hotel to request a price match.
While we want our room block rates to be competitive against the general internet, the room block product does not “guarantee” to beat every price online. If couples prefer to shop around to external websites, this is not the correct product. The room block guarantees that the rates you have today will remain as such until the final payment date, thereby typically making room block pricing very competitive by the time most guests book their rooms. Most couples contract a room block at least one year before their wedding, so they are holding those early rates while prices online can rise through time. Wedding guests are typically not willing to pay in full for their room too far in advance using an external site, many guests prefer to put down the small deposit much later down the line via the room block.
While it is rare to see room block rates that are exceptionally higher than external booking engines, if there is true price ambiguity, meaning our room rates are truly higher than what the general internet is providing, then it is important to let the resort know so they can look into it on a case by case basis. We take price matching seriously, but we must distinguish between a true price match scenario and the assumption that the room block is going to beat every random price everyone sees online.
Packaging air and hotel
Purchasing your holiday including air and hotel can sound like a good idea - and it can be if you are booking an individual holiday or a small group. For destination weddings, if you want to bundle air and hotel as a group to make sure there’s enough inventory and flat rates for everyone, then you would need to get all your guests prepared to make payments immediately. In the hundreds of weddings we have worked with, no couple with a medium-large size wedding has ever managed to motivate their guests to book air and hotel bundles. The room block allows guests to place a small deposit down the line to ensure their preferred room category is held in place and then to set up a payment plan whereby they can pay off their room balance over the next few months. They can watch flights and purchase at their convenience.
Final recommendations
Each wedding couple should decide early on how they want to address guests booking outside of the room block. There are typically a few different approaches that wedding couples take, it’s really up to each couple what they are comfortable with!
Many couples will simply not allow bookings outside the room block as they need to have a correct guest count by 3-4 months pre-travel so they can start working on their wedding day details, budget and venue locations - they are also trying to maximize comps. Even just one guest booking outside the room block could mean that you don’t meet your comp minimum, which could be the difference between thousands in comp dollars. Couples will often write on their wedding website “We respectfully ask that you book using the room block provided for logistical reasons, if you have any concerns about this please contact (“insert travel agent name”) directly”.
Other couples are more easy going about it and they provide the room block as a clear option for guests to book with, but also don’t mind if their guests book outside the room block. With this scenario you will need to manage your own guest list and you may not be maximizing comps, but at least you know that space is contracted for the bulk of your guests. If you do go this route, make sure that you can meet your room block minimum. If you are going to have guests booking outside the room block, please do not block off more rooms than you need as it hurts the hotel. They have carved out a portion of their inventory for your group and they cannot sell it to the general population, so when too many wedding groups have a large amount of rooms that go unused it can cause them to tighten their attrition policies for future groups. We have seen multiple hotels make their attritions so difficult for large groups due to wedding couples overestimating the amount of rooms they initially block that large weddings are no longer a viable option at select hotels.