Exclusive use - tips on selling rooms on to guests

How many rooms are there and how many guests are you having?

Our venue has 30 rooms and they held 15 back for us, they've all gone but they have opened the rest up for the wedding party discount they offer. We have 80 guests (with many of those being couples).

We didn't feel we needed to 'sell' the rooms & even though the hotel is fairly local to where we and many guests live people still booked them. Our rooms aren't cheap either, the cheapest rooms were £160ish but now the cheapest are £220 as the other rooms have gone.

My point is that you may not need to 'sell' them. But if you do then you could say things like that they can stay drinking in the bar past midnight if they have a room (this is what my hotel says as the cash bar shuts at 12 and you can only put drinks on your room bill).

If I'm reading this right, if you 'sell' these rooms to your guests, they'll knock off the price of your venue hire? hmmmmm tricky. i didn't any kinda deal like this if my hotel and in all honesty i thought they were expensive and KNEW from the off my family wouldn't get rooms there. Not sure if you should be trying to sell these to family members if they're not comfortable with the price

The package price we would pay includes 18 rooms. We have enough guests to easily fill these but rather than putting everyone up for free, we're going to ask our guests to pay us a small amount for the rooms depending on room size etc. This way we can claw back some of the package cost.

The rooms are gorgeous with standard nightly rates of £185 - £650. We can't charge our guests anywhere near that much though!