Welcome Bags – Wedding Wednesday

I am the crazy bride who thinks every detail of a wedding matters. To me every impression a guest gets with your wedding leaves an impression. From the first time the wedding comes up with your save the dates, to the feel and look of your invitation, and then to when they arrive and what that looks like. So when I got the option to be able to do welcome bags for our guests staying in our hotel block I was thrilled. Most of the guests who stayed were from my husbands side and so my mother in law graciously paid for these. I love how they turned out, and I wanted to share how you could make affordable ones. We made 25 bags and each bag cost about $20.

Brown Paper Bags – I knew that this would probably be the cheapest version of a bag I could find without looking dumpy. It was also helpful to me that I found one on Amazon for a quantity of 24. I spiced it up with a tag with our wedding crest on it and got ribbon from Joann’s that matched our colors.

Uber Gift Card – I’ll start with my favorite part about the bags, and the part that saved us money elsewhere. Transportation can be a huge part of a wedding budget. Renting a bus to get guests to and from the venue can costs thousands of dollars. Now if you aren’t getting married in a city and want to provide a shuttle, than this probably won’t apply to you. However, we got married in Orange County which totally has Uber’s everywhere. Instead of renting a shuttle, we decided to just give all of our guests staying at the hotel an Uber gift card. We made sure to tell them what time they would need to leave on the welcome card (also in the bag), but it worked perfectly! A lot of people used a bigger Uber and carpooled there and then back. I also heard from a lot of guests after the fact that they loved this part of the gift bags. The smallest amount I could find for the gift card was $15. I got it at my local grocery store (Vons).

Itinerary – I made and printed all our paper goods for the wedding myself, but you could get them done at a Kinko’s or Office Depot. Or if you ordered your invitations from somewhere they should be able to make you an itinerary as well. You can see a close up of ours here.

Snacks- We chose to get our snacks from Sams Club and found that was the most cost effective way. We choose water bottles, and then picked things that were Adam’s and my favorites. We did chips and cookies to fit the salty and sweet side.

Meds – Being that we were still in the midst of COVID we chose to include hand sanitizer too. We also included Advil for anyone who had a bit of a hangover the next day.

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