A room block is a hotel holding a number of rooms for your guests at an agreed rate, under your name, until an agreed date. It is simple in principle and there are three details that matter.

Detail one: who pays

In the arrangement we use, your guests do. The hotel holds the rooms, we give you a link, and each guest books and pays for their own room directly.

Their money never enters your budget. Their cancellations are never your problem. If a guest drops out, the room goes back into the block.

This is called a courtesy block or a non-committal block, and it is what you want.

The alternative (a guaranteed block, where you contract for a number of rooms and pay for any that go unsold) exists and occasionally makes sense for very large multi-day celebrations where the hotel will not release exclusivity otherwise. If anyone proposes one, understand that you are underwriting empty rooms, and ask why the courtesy version is not available.

Detail two: the release date

The block is not open forever. Somewhere between eight and twelve weeks before the wedding, unclaimed rooms go back to the hotel and become general inventory.

After that date your guests can still book, but at the public rate, which in Bodrum in August is a different number entirely.

This is one of very few hard deadlines in a destination wedding. Missing it does not break anything; it just makes the late bookers pay more and then tell you about it.

What to do: send a reminder two weeks before the release date, and another three days before. Then let it go.

Detail three: what a group rate actually is

Not always a discount. Sometimes it is the same rate as the hotel's own website with breakfast added, or with a flexible cancellation policy attached, or with a room category upgrade.

The genuinely useful part is often not the price. It is that fifty guests end up in the same hotel, which means:

  • One shuttle rather than six taxi arrangements
  • Guests meeting each other at breakfast before the wedding
  • One phone number for everybody's problems
  • No one stranded in a hotel forty minutes away

That is what a block buys, and it is worth more than a percentage off.

How many rooms to block

Roughly seventy percent of your expected guest rooms, not a hundred.

Some guests will book elsewhere. Some will bring their own arrangements. Some will stay with family. A block sized to your full guest list is a block that will be substantially unclaimed, and hotels remember that.

Better to block seventy percent and extend if it fills, which they will almost always allow.

Above about a hundred and fifty guests you will need more than one property in most regions, Belek being the main exception, which is precisely why large weddings end up there.

If you are blocking two or three hotels, tier them: one at the venue's own standard, one a step down for guests watching the cost, and make the difference clear on the guest page. Guests appreciate the choice and nobody has to ask an awkward question.

Aisha and Omar's two hundred and twelve guests used three hotels within a fifteen-minute radius with a loop bus between them.

The mistake that costs money

Blocking rooms at a hotel that is not where the wedding is, without checking the transfer, and then discovering it is thirty-five minutes each way on a road that is slow at seven in the evening.

Check the actual journey at the actual hour. Map estimates on the Turkish coast in August are optimistic.

What we do

Negotiate the rate, hold the block under your name, produce the booking link, chase the hotel when a guest reports a problem, and tell you when the release date is approaching.

What we do not do is take a commission from the hotel on your guests' rooms. If a planner is unwilling to answer that question directly, ask it again.

When to send the block link and how to choose the airport it should be near.