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Bridal and Honeymoon suites January 25, 2013 Our Wedding

One of the key features of our wedding was the over-abundance of hotel rooms that we had at our disposal. To be specific, we had the 25 largest suites in the building reserved for the entire weekend including a three and four bedroom penthouse suite which served as our honeymoon and bridal suites respectively. The suites we reserved added an additional $10,000 to the cost of our wedding, but they were worth it! Here's the story of why we had so much room to play.

I live in Utah but most of my family is on the east coast. I knew it would be a burden for my uncles, aunts and cousins to make the trip out west, so I decided to encourage them by making the trip more interesting. To that end my wife and I agreed to a destination wedding at The Canyons resort rather than a smaller and 'cheaper' event at LaCailles. I wanted my guests to be able to spend an entire weekend onsite in comfort without having to worry about transportation between their hotels, the ceremony, and the reception. Snowbird was closer to my home, but was ruled out because I'd planned a wedding there with my ex- fiance before and my wife really wasn't interested in being a bride at somebody else's wedding. I'd attended events at The Canyons before, so it was my next (and actually preferred because it was a more exciting) choice.

Once we agreed on The Canyons as our resort and had picked a date, the die was cast. We got a small bridal suite as part of our wedding package (one night in a 1-bedroom suite) and that would have been satisfactory except that I wanted my best man at the time and my soon-to-be stepson to be able to stay in the suite with us. We eventually decided to reserve 3 bedroom Penthouse Suite 701 in addition to the courtesy suite for the wedding weekend. The original plan was to give the courtesy suite to my soon-to-be mother-in-law.

Next we called the reservations desk to find out how easy it would be for our guests to get rooms the weekend of our wedding. We were politely informed that not only was there to be a jazz concert at The Canyons on the weekend of our wedding, but also a teacher's convention! The two events together meant that the hotel would likely sell out weeks in advance of our wedding, but worse than that, the teacher's convention meant that all the 'cheap' hotel room at the resort were already booked. We decided (based on our RSVP list) to reserve the bulk of the remaining rooms for my family as a precaution. Most of the remaining rooms were suites of varying sizes, so we eventually became experts on what all of the various room and reservation codes meant. We reserved four bedroom Penthouse Suite 704 to save money by packing Shirley's family together in a single unit.

As the wedding approached, it became clear that nobody on my mother's side of my family would be attending our wedding. My mother and I had by then had a falling out over among other things her continued association with convicted felons and con-artists and we'd ceased speaking to one another months before. Most of my uncles, aunts and cousins decided not to attend my wedding either out of protest or to avoid starting a family feud. I was thus contractually 'stuck' with 25 suites at one of Utah's top resorts on the weekend of my wedding and no way to get out of my contract - what to do?

The answer was simple - we started giving rooms away to the people who DID show up for our wedding! Everybody and his brother got a suite: my dad got a two bedroom, my sister and my nephew shared a two bedroom, our DJ got a one bedroom, our band got a two bedroom, the classical guitarist got a one bedroom, my wife's mother got a one bedroom, her sisters got adjoining two bedroom suites with a huge common area, my best men got two bedroom suites, even the administrator of one of my nightlife websites (who'd had too much to drink and wasn't able to drive home safely) got a suite. My wife shared her four-bedroom suite with her Maid of Honor and her son, and I stayed in the honeymoon suite along until after the night of the wedding.

In the end, it was awesome! Shirley had so much room in her suite that we decided to take all our family photos in one of her living rooms before the ceremony. After the reception was over we staged a small after-party at her ten-person dining room table. The next day, my family and friends all gathered in my living room to socialize before going home.

Given the chance to do it all over, I probably wouldn't have reserved QUITE so many suites (and saved myself a few thousand dollars) but I'm glad we had enough space for everybody to stay onsite and relax. The over-abundance of rooms gave us the flexibility to accommodate everyone who wanted to stay overnight and then some. It was a great memory that everyone who participated said they enjoyed immensely.