Bride-to-be Blogger Kathleen: Should We Take a School Bus To Our Wedding?

Hemera

Sigh.

Why are school bus rentals so expensive? I mean, I remember riding those things for free back in the day. The bus always showed up on time, pulled right up to the end of my driveway, and I never even had to give the driver a tip. (I believe a couple of times I gave the drivers macaroni necklaces as a “thank you for all you do” present, but they never expected to receive those kinds of priceless tokens.)

So why is it that when you need a school bus to take a bunch of happy, responsible adults to and from a hotel for a wedding, it will cost you $600-$800 (tip not included)? A school bus—the big, yellowish-orange bus with no seatbelts—will cost you a little shy of a grand, and for what reason? Because the transportation is for a wedding? I know a bunch of wedding experts recommend that you should avoid saying the word “wedding” to a vendor until you absolutely have to, but that is a little difficult when the vendor’s first question to you is “Is this for a wedding?” Um, yes. I can’t lie!

I guess I am just really frustrated, because I thought that this would be one of the cheaper wedding items we’d have to take care of. I mean, we are talking about a school bus, after all, not a big charter bus (which we received one price quote for and it was only $200 more than that silly yellow bus). The hotel we booked has two 15-passenger vans that I have reserved just in case (for a fee), but I have a feeling that won’t be enough, and our guests will be spending a good amount of time waiting for the shuttles. My thought was that we would just get one school bus, save some money, and have all of our overnight guests taken care of all at once.

Maybe we can look into booking an additional 15-passenger van, and hopefully the wait won’t be too bad. But then, those numbers combined would probably end up being the same as one school bus … and we would have to tip more drivers. Who knows, maybe there is a nice tailgating Eagles fan in the Malvern area who would be so kind as to let us book their tailgating bus for our transportation? I’m running out of ideas!

Has anyone else run into trouble—or prices!—they didn’t expect when booking transportation for your wedding? Any smart options out there that I’m not thinking of?

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