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Choosing to hold your destination wedding at a private villa is a fantastic alternative to holding it at a commercial hotel. However, the decision to do so and the process of selecting which one are both a bit more complicated. This series of articles gives you all the information you need in order to make the best decision possible for your wedding.
Here in this series of articles published weekly we offer you the inside scoop on the financial and “strategic” aspects of renting a private villa for your destination wedding:
PART ONE: How and why villa owners price their properties, and when those prices change.
PART TWO: What all the costs are involved with renting a private villa.
PART THREE: How those rental costs are normally divided among the group staying there.
PART FOUR: How to negotiate with your friends and family for their part of the booking price.
PART FIVE: How to save money and protect yourself financially on your booking.
PART SIX: The actual price range of our event villas in the Mexican Caribbean.
PART FOUR: How to Negotiate with Your Guests, Family, and Friends about Villa Rental Payments
Choosing how to get the villa rental paid for is completely up to you as the sponsoring couple. As one option, you can choose to pay for the entire rental yourselves. That makes the rest of this article irrelevant, but it’s also pretty expensive.
If instead you decide that you’d like your friends’ financial support in paying for part of the main venue villa rental, there are a few different strategies to asking them. Again, we don’t know them and you do, so you’d have to use your best judgment about which of these, if any, would be successful with your people.
This issue is directly related to whom you’re going to want to “assign” or invite to live in the villa during the wedding week, and whether you both want to stay there or elsewhere. Assuming you want to stay there yourselves, you’ll be asking yourselves whom do you want to be there with you? How much are you willing to ask them to pay, if anything? Are they willing to stay the required minimum number of nights for that villa rental? Will they mind the hubbub outside their door the day of the wedding?
It may be that it’s purely family members that you’re thinking about, and it may be that you’re already planning to pay for everything there yourselves. But it may also be that you’ve strategized that they could wind up paying for everything and you yourselves pay for very little. All these ins and outs are completely up to you, your relationship with these people, and what you negotiate with them.
As we mentioned previously in this series of articles, you generally you can split the rental costs fairly evenly among all the residents. However, you also have two other ways to imagine taking care of the costs: a subsidizing method and a subsidized method.
- Simple method—just figure out each person’s per-person cost, or each couple’s per-bedroom cost, based on the total cost and the total number of bedrooms. This approach assumes total transparency, with numbers derived straight off the villa’s own website.
- Subsidizing method—let’s say that you’re willing to pay yourselves for half the total villa rental, and then the others can split the rest evenly between them. Simply deduct your portion from the total bill, and calculate the remainder as divided evenly among the number of bedrooms/couples, and singles if there are any.
- Subsidized method—this is the same thing, but in reverse. Let’s say that you’d like it for the other people staying in the villa to either partially or completely subsidize your stay there—your bedroom. In this case, you simply figure out how much you’re able/willing to pay of your percentage, and then you can divide the remainder of the total bill evenly among the several other bedrooms. It’s a good idea to be open about this, because there’s no reason to think that one or several of them wouldn’t look on the villa’s own website to find out the regular going rate per bedroom.
A fourth alternative could be that you choose to not stay in the main villa yourselves, but in alternative accommodations somewhere nearby. That decision might make these previous discussions moot, especially the one about asking for your friends/family to subsidize your bedroom.
In general, it’s by far the best to collect the money from your family and friends directly yourselves IN ADVANCE before the trip, so that there’s no possibility of wiggling out of any payment during or after the trip. You should also let people know that you’re on the hook for the money in case they need to cancel, or even just postpone their arrival by a night. So once they make the decision to join you in that house, you’ll want to be firm with them about their financial responsibilities to the group and to you as organizers.
NEXT: WAYS TO SAVE MONEY AND LOWER YOUR FINANCIAL RISK IN RENTING A PRIVATE VILLA
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