How can I have my wedding guests select/pay me back for accommodations?

May 22, 2017 11:33 AM

Booked a summer camp venue in Ohio for my wedding next year -- yay! Now we need a way for people to book and pay for spots at the camp somehow -- we're going to pay in bulk for the entire camp itself, and have people pay us back based on the spots they want. Anyone know of an easy way we could whip something up (or use a service) online for people to check off how many spots and how many nights, and then pay us back?

Ideally, we'd have a Google form or something where people could choose "1 bunk bed in x cabin, 2 double-beds in y cabin, etc." and then be taken to a spot where it would calculate, based on their suggestion, how much they owed (just like booking a hotel) and link them to a spot like venmo/paypal/square cash to pay us directly.

I assume there are services similar to Splitwise, but most that I know take a sizeable cut of the cash. Just wondering if you know of any cheapo or free services, or have any ideas on how to best do this -- even if it's just piecing together our own site with hard-coded links to everything. We're going to have about 200 people doing this, so it would be super spectacular to find a workaround to not do it manually.

Thanks in advance!

posted by knownassociate to Technology (7 answers total)

Best answer: I'm pretty sure you can do this bare bones in square for "free" (% fee per transaction, which you can build into the cost when you price your rooms). Here's their online store page.
posted by phunniemee at 11:48 AM on May 22, 2017

You can do this in SignUpGenius, including linking to PayPal, for a max total of 5% plus 50 cents per transaction (that includes PayPal and SUG's fees).

I wonder if GoogleForms would be an option?
posted by cooker girl at 12:27 PM on May 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

A how-to outlining various options.
posted by beagle at 2:20 PM on May 22, 2017

Seconding the notion of setting up a Square store and doing the math so the purchasers pay the transaction costs and you get the amount you want to get.
posted by slkinsey at 2:28 PM on May 22, 2017

Yeah, I'd just prefer to send you a check, and I have a computer science degree. The likelihood of an automated system working without being more trouble than it's worth is essentially zero, and that's not even taking potential security breaches/service fees supporting terrible policies into account. It will be easier for you as organizers to just do this without talking a "short cut."
posted by amtho at 6:50 PM on May 22, 2017

Yeah, definitely have non-tech options for people to send you money. No matter how user-friendly your setup is, people are going to have trouble with it. We're getting married in 12 days, and used an app for the bulk of our RSVPs. We sent response cards to some of my parents' friends. It's hard to definitively attribute the lack of responses to different age groups' social norms, but we had about an 80% return rate on the response cards, and had to call about 100 of our 250 person guest list because so many people just *could* *not* figure out how to RSVP online (and didn't think to pick up the phone and let us know that they were or were not coming).
posted by honeybee413 at 10:22 PM on May 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: thanks, team! I'll definitely have check options for the non-techies, too.
posted by knownassociate at 12:32 PM on June 23, 2017