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 ONE: How Villas Are Priced
It can be overwhelming just to try to figure out how much renting a private villa will cost per person. If you have ever spent any time on one of the large websites for renting private villas, such as HomeAway (www.homeaway.com) or VRBO (Vacation Rentals by Owner) (www.vrbo.com), you will probably relate! There are so many variables involved—dates, seasons, number of nights, number of guests–that figuring out exactly what you want can give you a headache! In this first article in a six-part series, we give you a quick list of the main factors involved in villa pricing.
SEASONALITY. Villa owners of course want to maximize their profits. Just like hotels, they have fixed assets that they are trying keep occupied as much as possible at the highest rates possible. In all parts of Mexico, they also have to deal with a very popular winter high season and a not-so-popular summer low season. There are two main factors that influence the high and low season–the winter weather in the U.S. and Canada and the summer weather in Mexico. In the summer it is typically VERY hot in the Mexican tropics and also rains a lot more. As well, the weather is seasonably better farther north, keeping more people at home. In the winter, at the same time the winter weather is so cold up north, in Mexico the weather couldn’t be nicer, so people flock south.
For these reasons, villa owners, along with hotel managers everywhere in Mexico, raise their prices significantly in the winter months so that they can capitalize on the increased demand for their properties.
Another factor is hurricane season, which officially runs from June 1 to October 31, but the most likely risk lies between August 1 and September 30. In the Mexican Caribbean this means that prices are the lowest of the year, trying to lure those people willing to risk bad weather during their vacations.
And finally, there are two big holiday seasons that jack up the prices at villas just like at hotels out of the reach of most wedding couples: Christmas-New Year’s and Easter Holy Week. Availability is typically very limited because many families rent the same houses year after year, and owners feel comfortable doubling or even tripling their normal rate for these weeks. Because these weeks are so expensive and hard to book, it is very rare to schedule a destination wedding at these times, and we don’t recommend it.
Thus, the most popular months to schedule events are typically March-June and November-early December. There is a good combination of reasonable rates and likelihood of good weather, but the weather is not too bloody hot. And because there are relatively few weekends involved, they get booked up many months if not a year in advance for destination weddings.
VILLA SIZE. Many of the private luxury villas that we use for destination weddings in the Mexican Caribbean are quite large, meaning more than eight bedrooms. The reason that they work so well for destination weddings is not just because of the number of bedrooms but the amount of outdoor space available for the event itself. We typically like to use two spaces on property—the beach or the place with the most prominent view of the ocean, and then another space most suitable for the reception/banquet. This typically is near or around the ever-present swimming pool!
Larger villas are typically more difficult for owners to rent, simply because they’re more expensive, and they require larger groups to rent them to make them economical. Therefore, many owners have adapted to this issue by making it possible to rent fewer than all their bedrooms. For instance, a villa that has a total of 11 bedrooms can be rented for a week using as few as five bedrooms (or 6-10). Each quantity of bedrooms has its own nightly rate, and that rate normally comes down proportionally per person if more bedrooms are rented. The owner obviously wants to fill up her/his house, but is willing to do partial occupancy to make it approachable for more groups, especially in the lower, leaner seasons. But that owner will charge more per person in those cases, both to try to coax the group into renting more bedrooms and to drive up their profit per rental, even on these relatively smaller groups. Destination wedding groups try to fill up as many bedrooms as possible with friends and families, so this issue doesn’t arise, and it’s one reason why many villa owners consent to doing the weddings in the first place, if they have enough outdoor space for them.
SIZE of STAFF. Staffing of a villa directly relates to its size, so a larger house will necessarily need a larger staff. More staff means more expense, so the cost will go up accordingly. But this also means more people to take care of your group!
MAINTENANCE. Each one of these large properties is right on the salty ocean and sitting in tropical sunlight broken only by torrential rains with potential flooding down steep mountain slopes. What could go wrong? Or get broken? Or wear out? Yes, the maintenance issues are such that we don’t really even want to know about them. Just imagine the worst, and it’s another reason why private luxury villas aren’t cheap. The maintenance is year-round, constant, and never-ending. And then there are the periodic upgrades or remodeling efforts! Any wonder why villa owners want to keep their houses full year-round? Not all aspects of paradise are fun!
MINIMUM NIGHTS. Another way villa owners attempt to maximize their revenue and decrease their logistical issues is by making a policy that requires groups to stay a minimum number of nights, sometimes up to 7 nights. In this aspect villas are quite different from hotels. The main reason is simply that they can only have one group at a time. So, they must attempt to keep their turnover in groups as low as possible. The lowest minimum number of nights that we have seen is three nights, almost always only in low (summer) season. A majority of villas have either four or five nights as their minimum, and another percentage has six- or seven-night minimums. This is an important factor when choosing which private villa you’ll want to use. Each group is different, but on average we have found that most wedding guests traveling internationally prefer to stay three or four nights.
NEXT: ALL THE COSTS ASSOCIATED WITH RENTING A PRIVATE VILLA FOR A DESTINATION WEDDING
