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 Mexico.
Part Six: What Do Private Luxury Villas Really Cost?
In previous articles in this series we have covered many of the aspects of renting a private luxury villa for your destination wedding, but here at last we get down to the nitty-gritty! What can you actually expect to pay per night at the villas we use for our destination weddings? The situation is pretty complicated, but we have developed a system to make it much easier for you to compare apples to apples!
As we have written before, no two private villas are alike, and it is normally useless to attempt to compare them. However, the prices that they charge fall into a relatively narrow window because the owners know that they are generally competing with their neighbors for customers. Just like in any real estate market, several physical factors affect a house’s desirability—location, proximity to the beach, views, size, bedrooms, etc. Seasonality also comes into play, as we’ve mentioned previously, along with a host of other factors. One pricing factor, since so many houses are used for weddings, is the size of their beachfront or oceanview terrace for events!
Villa owners normally just list their prices for their entire house, since that is easier, and will have one price for high season in winter and another for the summer low season. They may also add in a shoulder season in the spring and/or fall, to maximize their revenue. On their website or on the several management-company websites for each community, most will list their base prices without the taxes involved, while some add them in. All in all, it’s typically very difficult to be able to directly compare what you will actually pay per person for any large-group rental at one of these private luxury villas.
We have developed a calculator to determine the cost per person per night for each villa where we operate to make it much easier to compare prices. The calculator takes into consideration a whole host of criteria to get to this price per person, and doesn’t take into consideration several others:
1 – We assume a full house, i.e., all bedrooms rented. Some larger villas permit incomplete rentals in general, buy not typically for events, so we’re always assuming a completely full property.
2 – We assume winter high season pricing, typically November through April. Low-season prices can be expected to be 20-30% less.
3 – We include the mandatory $16% value-added tax in Mexico and a 3% occupancy tax.
4 – While our pricing is based on double occupancy, it doesn’t take into account those instances when more than two people can sleep in a bedroom, such as when there are two queen beds or a king and a single, or simply an extra daybed in the room that can be used. Some villas charge a fee per “extra” guest above two per room and some do not.
5 – We also don’t get into the differences between rooms (see article #3), like when it might make sense to charge people more to sleep in the master bedroom or less in a bedroom without a view. That is a level of complexity that would make it impossible to ever compare basic prices.
6 – Here we also don’t take into account the event fee, if any, that the villa owner charges in order to hold an event. This is a separate fee that’s determined by the size of the event, and while it may be discounted by the number of nights the villa is rented, it varies completely depending on the house.
Based on all these complex calculations, we have developed this simple system for pricing the villas, much like the system that’s used in magazines and guides for restaurants:
$ – $101-150 US dollars per person per night
$$ = $151-$200 US dollars per person per night
$$$ = $201-$250 US dollars per person per night
$$$$ = $251-$300 US dollars per person per night
$$$$$ = more than $300 US dollars per person per night
The good news is that the vast majority of the villas we use in both Riviera Maya and Puerto Vallarta fall into the first $ or $$ categories, meaning that the prices for those villas range between $100 and $200 per person per night. Taking into consideration that it normally also includes the service and preparations of at least two meals per day by a private chef (groceries not included but normally really inexpensive), these prices compare favorably with the expensive large hotels and all-inclusive resorts.
The prices you see on the villa websites at first look really high, but we have gone to the trouble to divide them up for you per person so that you can see exactly how they compare with other lodging and event-venue options. And exactly for these financial reasons, we are convinced that private villas make the best locations for LGBT destination weddings in Mexico.
If you would like to see this calculator in action, and are interested in finding out more about the price ranges of our selected destination wedding event venues, please request a copy of our brand new 2017 Mexico Event Design Property Catalogs, one for Riviera Maya and one for Puerto Vallarta. Each one features gorgeous photos of each property and outlines its size and rental cost.
[AUTHOR’s NOTE] At Mexico Event Design we are working feverishly on adapting all this research and information on private villas into a new guide to be published later in 2017! Best Undiscovered Mexico Venues for your Destination Wedding will be an in-depth guide to small hotels and private villas located all across Mexico, all of them perfect locations for destination weddings. Stay tuned for more information to come!
