Welcome bag delivery fee?

I've heard of that, but 5 dollars sounds high to me.

One of our hotels did charge 1 or 2 dollars per bag, but we didn't know about it until the day we dropped them off and I was way too in IDGAF mode to care at the time,

Yes, my venue has this too (it's an inn/spa combo). Ours is $3 per bag. We opted not to do it, as the Inn provides snack baskets in every room for every guest as a standard.

Yes, I've come across this before. However, IIRC, at least one or two of the hotels I looked at only charged this fee if they actually had the bag(s) waiting inside the guests' rooms when they arrived. There was no fee to just hand it out at check in. So I think it is strange that they would charge this fee just to hand the guests a bag, shouldn't be much different than giving them their room keys/paperwork.

I think $5 is to high especially if you're doing it yourself

I've never heard of these fees at all before, so I'm glad they're somewhat normal. We should've read the fine print ahead of time, because now we've already bought the bags and supplies to stuff them, so I guess we have to go ahead and pay the fee.

Have you asked if you could drop them off yourself and forgo the fee? I'm sure it's just to compensate for the extra coordination on their part to get them up to the room, in. addition to everyone's normal work stuff.

Yeah our resort has a $4 charge, we are having a welcome party and I am going to hand out the bags myself.

Cynic that I am, I think the hotels do it because you are cutting down on their minibar $$$.

Ugh yes. The hotel where my family stayed charged $8 per welcome bag just to hand them out. I made my mom hand-deliver them

No, Karen, it's a charge because you have to pull someone from their regular job, whatever that may be, to find out what room people are in(which can change up to five mins before check in), and then go physically deliver those bags, and in a large hotel 10 bags can easily take an hour to deliver, more than that we're talking a half day of walking around placing bags in rooms.

Like all small charges, you're more likely to find this at higher end, larger hotels. Smaller boutique hotels tend to not charge for this.

$8?!? WOW.

We're going to ask them if it's possible to waive or reduce that. I don't know when else we'll see everyone to give them the bags, so we kind of have to go through the hotel.

Lauren, they probably won't waive that fee, it's not as easy as people think just to have them waiting in the rooms. It's a delivery service - pay for it!

@m, thanks for explaining that more. I didn't account for all that time, because I just assumed since people reserved rooms with our room block that would be easily identified and given a bag at check-in. If someone has to walk around the property to find them, I can see how that would take a lot of time.

It's standard.

I work at a hotel and we don't charge for it, but we're independent, and it usually means I have to run my butt off like a moron, so I wish we did charge haha.

Check-ins don't always work because people use different names or do something weird at check in that can throw us off.

I do feel better knowing the work that goes into it. I've only been on the receiving end of welcome bags and it seemed so simple, I was struggling to understand why they were charging so much. Thanks to everyone for making me realize this is a standard practice!

If it makes you feel better my SIL spent hours before her wedding creating welcome "boxes" - put them all together,r put stuff in them, and some way, some how.... housekeeping thought it was trash, and threw them ALL out. Could be worse!

We were able to sign a contract with Marriott before they started charging for bag delivery. When we took the FH and my mom to go check out the hotel (they hadn't seen it before) my mom commented on all the bags they had to deliver/behind the desk. The coordinator mentioned that we were lucky and they now charge $5 delivery fee. Couldn't believe it, attach the word wedding to anything and you get so overcharged!

It sounded like it may be a new Marriott policy as well, not just our specific location.

Couldn't believe it, attach the word wedding to anything and you get so overcharged!

No, it's just that your'e asking for someone to hand delivery a specific package to a specific person, and that someone is not the post office. You require a service, you pay for it, wedding or not.

We didn't pay a fee. They handed them out at check- in.