As wedding costs continue to increase, some couples are charging guests to attend their special day.
Rows of empty white chairs on the grass, shot from last row to front row, with pink and white wedding bouquets tied to top corners of aisle seats. The photo blurs as it reaches the altar and ocean beyond it in the distance.
With many guests already spending hundreds of dollars to attend a wedding, some experts say that requiring an entrance fee to your nuptials is in poor taste.
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 Sauveur, a wedding planning company in London, said that selling tickets “introduces a strange relationship between you and your guests, turning your guests into customers.”
(New York Times)
