Explain the room block?

[OMGWDWWedding]

I know I have read threads about room blocks before but I can't seem to find any of them now. We are trying to fill out our preliminary paperwork (before the LOA) and Disney is asking for room block information. Is it better to estimate high or low for how many room nights we will need? Should we estimate a high number of nights over a short period or a low number of nights over a longer period? I think many of our guests will come over the weekend, stay for the Monday wedding, then leave before the end of the week;however there may be a few that stay to make a vacation out of it.
I remember hearing that we can tweak the number of room nights we guarantee as we go, but I am still afraid we are going to completely botch things, I wish Disney would give some kind of general formula to help fill this in. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

 

[elphie101]

I say it depends on when your wedding is, where your rooms are and what you know of your guests. To speak of my own experience, we blocked Beach Club during Columbus Day weekend, so we blocked extra rooms there knowing that with the holiday weekend and Food & Wine and being an Epcot resort it would sell out (which it did). Honestly though I would say that's more of a special circumstance - I know of many people who just do the minimum number just to make the LOA - you can change it up! Don't stress

 

[mb187143]

I know I have read threads about room blocks before but I can't seem to find any of them now. We are trying to fill out our preliminary paperwork (before the LOA) and Disney is asking for room block information. Is it better to estimate high or low for how many room nights we will need? Should we estimate a high number of nights over a short period or a low number of nights over a longer period? I think many of our guests will come over the weekend, stay for the Monday wedding, then leave before the end of the week;however there may be a few that stay to make a vacation out of it. I remember hearing that we can tweak the number of room nights we guarantee as we go, but I am still afraid we are going to completely botch things, I wish Disney would give some kind of general formula to help fill this in. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Well, to start with, we asked our parents/siblings/wedding party when they thought they'd be coming and how log they would stay, and used that as the bulk of our block. You have to fill 80% of the rooms you block, but if you booked too many you can drop some of the rooms up to 60 days out (I think it's 60, could be wrong). Consider how spread out your guests will be if you block multiple resorts - that could impact transportation if you use the charter motor coach. We blocked at 4 resorts, but two of them were the contemporary where our families stayed (so they were in the limo and we didn't have to provide extra transportation), and the other was the Grand Floridian where our wedding was, so we only had to do transportation from POFQ and Pop.

So there really isn't any formula that fits everyone since everyone's priorities are going to a different. We added rooms to our block because we had more people book than anticipated, which was super easy. You'll also get updates from your room block coordinator which will help you decide whether to add or drop rooms if you need to.

 

[NoOrdinaryPrincess]

We guaranteed the minimum number of rooms then added as needed. We geruntee 25 then ended up with 93. Unless your wedding is during super busy holiday time, I recommend this.

 

[bigr3ddog]

Don't go too high either. When adjusting your block, you can only decrease by up to 25 room nights. I know that just complicates things. We started our block with a 50-50 split between our deluxe and our value. However, we knew our deluxe was more likely to sell out than our value, so we started to stack more rooms in the deluxe, taking away from the value.

We did not have a moderate.

 

[kanadar]

We just did ours actually. We are inviting around 110 people to the wedding but for the room block for now we just went with 60 rooms spread out over 3 resorts, with most of them at the Boardwalk as that is where the wedding and reception are. We will up it if/when we need to. I was starting to stress about it and then I listened to Carrie's podcast on the room block. http://disneyweddingpodcast.com/2013/01/16/demystifying-the-room-block/ It really helped! I decided to pick a somewhat random number and went with that.

 

[OMGWDWWedding]

Thank you everyone for the replies! Carries podcast was a huge help! I think we will start with the minimum number of room nights and add as necessary. This makes me feel so much better about the whole thing.