Planning a wedding has become so expensive that some couples are asking their guests to pay to attend their special day.
Hassan Ahmed, 23, is charging his guests $450 for a ticket to his wedding next year in Houston, where he lives. Mr. Ahmed said he hadn’t heard back from many of his 125 wedding guests. But he has already spent over $100,000 on the wedding, including deposits for the venue, the D.J. and the photographer. In a video on TikTok, he said he was confused by the response, noting that many of his guests had spent more money on Beyoncé or Chris Brown tickets.
According to a study by the wedding planning website the Knot, the average cost of a wedding ceremony and reception in 2023 was $35,000 — an increase of $5,000 from the year before. The Knot surveyed about 10,000 couples who had married in the United States in 2023.
But the approach of selling tickets to a wedding has mostly upset guests, many of whom have expressed the opinion that it is in poor taste for the couple to put their financial burden onto their guests and that there are more cost-effective ways for couples to have a wedding.
Matthew Shaw, the founder of Saveur, a wedding planning company in London, said that selling tickets “introduces a strange relationship between you and your guests, turning your guests into customers.”
He added, “You’re no longer hosting — you’re offering them a paid experience, which introduces a very different narrative in terms of what guests are expecting.”
Though the cost of having a wedding is increasing, Mr. Shaw added: “I think there’s this assumption that we must have these big weddings. You can have really magical scaled-back and simpler celebrations, or more intimate and fewer guests. When we all went through the pandemic, we found other ways to celebrate.”
The cost of being a guest is also becoming more expensive. The average cost of attending a wedding is $580, according to a 2023 study by the Knot, which surveyed 1,000 people who had attended a wedding in the previous year. That was an increase of $120 compared with 2021.
Nova Styles and Reemo Styles, who were married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in June 2023, charged guests $333 and sold all their tickets.
The couple, who live on the Upper East Side, said they had not charged guests to cover the cost of their wedding, which was upward of $70,000; rather, they had needed to winnow their guest list down significantly.
The couple hired a double-decker bus that took guests to New York landmarks that were significant in their love story. The first stop was the legal ceremony at the cathedral. Other stops included Hudson Yards, where Mr. Styles, 31, proposed, and the 42nd Street AMC theater, where they played a video of their journey together. The final stop was the reception, which was held at a private event space on the 102nd floor at the One World Observatory.
The couple originally had a 350-person guest list, but the bus had space for only 60 people. “It was stressful,” Mr. Styles said. “We had to figure out a way for them to choose us, because we can’t choose them.”
Ms. Styles added, “We wanted people who really wanted to be there.” They felt that the ticket system was the best way to do it.
Lola Marie, 41, a close friend of the couple who paid the $333 ticket price, was at first confused when she received the invitation.
“I was definitely hesitant,” Ms. Marie said. “I was shocked. ‘Pay for a wedding? I never heard nothing like that. That sounds crazy. Who y’all think y’all are?’”
She called the couple, and once they explained their reasoning for selling tickets to their wedding, she understood. She decided to pay immediately after the call.
“It was worth more than $333,” Ms. Marie said, adding that she knew the couple’s intention was not to make money from their guests. She said she had a lot of fun celebrating and would have paid much more for the steak and lobster dinner at the top of One World Trade Center, with stunning views of the city and a surprise performance by the rapper Fabolous.
Jamie Wolfer, the founder of Wolfer & Co., a wedding planning company in Waco, Texas, said that while she understood that each couple would have a unique situation, generally, charging guests for tickets “really does kind of feel like a social faux pas” that can lead to conflicts between couples and their guests.
Mr. Shaw added that he could see a situation where couples ask guests to throw in $50 because times are tough, or a request for cash gifts. “But this is serious money people are asking,” he said.
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