Wishes wedding tax and tip question

[hope1826]

Hi Ladies and Gent,
I guess this question is for those of you who have had your Disney Wishes wedding already.

We are about to sign our contract for May 2008 and we were having trouble estimating what the taxes and tips would amount to.

We have 40 guests and are booked for Sea Breeze Point at 5pm, The Attic at 6pm @ $100/person. We are trying to stay as close to our $10,000 minimum as possible. We are using an outside photographer though.

Can anyone help us figure out a realistic range for the taxes and tips? What items require tipping? Are the sales tax and tips added to the total $10,000 or added to individual items?

Thank you in advance for your help!!

 

[lurkyloo]

Hi! The 20% service fee and sales tax are added to individual items in your budget, and it can be very confusing knowing what gets what.

The service charge is basically only on food, but I'm being assessed a service charge on my sound system and iPod setup too for some reason. Then there are handling fees for the cake and delivery fees for floral items.

6.5% Florida sales tax is charged on everything but transportation. Oh, and the service charges and handling fees get taxed too My budget spreadsheet is so complicated it looks like the national budget....

 

[hope1826]

YIKES!!!!

What percent of your total budget is all of that coming up to?

 

[hope1826]

LOL...http://www.wdwinfo.com/images/smilies/laughing.gif


Lurkyloo - I'm sure this is late, but I just realized that you live in "Disneyland". And I can't stop laughing. That's great!!

 

[lurkyloo]

Lurkyloo - I'm sure this is late, but I just realized that you live in "Disneyland". And I can't stop laughing. That's great!!

Hee hee! Well, let's see if I can do the math on my BEO and figure out what percent of the budget tax works out to....

It looks like about 17%, meaning that if one's budget to just over the $10,000 minimum like ours is (we're over by $300), about 17% of that $10,000 is added in taxes and service fees. But this is all based on the elements we chose that require service fees and/or tax, so it will be different depending on what choices you make.

When I was trying to figure out what a Wishes wedding would cost us, I put together a pretend budget using prices for elements I knew I wanted that I found in posts on this board. Then I figured out the tax and service fees on all those things and got a pretty good picture.

Hope this helps!

 

[hope1826]

Wow, that's right around where I estimated ours to be with an additional 10% for tips. Does your 17% include or exclude tips?

 

[lurkyloo]

Well... if by tips you mean the 20% service charge, then yes they are included! But if you mean actual tips for vendors, then no because you don't need to tip anybody associated with the Disney portion of the wedding. The servers, bartenders, etc. fall under the service charge. About the only one on my BEO who will require a tip is the limo driver.

Some of our non-Disney services will require tips - dress steaming and hair/makeup, for instance. But I separate out our budget into what we're paying Disney and what we're paying everyone else, so I haven't figured out yet how many of our non-Disney expenses require tipping (and don't forget that you don't need to tip people who own their businesses, like the [non-Disney] photographer...)

Does that make sense?