Hotel Monaco DC Wedding Cost: How Much Should I Budget? – Updated 2024
I am back with another wedding cost breakdown for a super popular wedding venue in DC: Hotel Monaco, a Kimpton property. I love this hotel. The staff is so helpful and friendly. The ballrooms are really nice. The location of the wedding suite is well located to the event space.
Hotel weddings are convenient because they include many items and can take some decision-making off your plate if you choose to. The tables, chairs, linens, and tabletop pieces all live there, and you can roll with those items if you like. However, this can also make it hard to compare the costs of a hotel wedding to a wedding at an off-site venue. I hope you find this examination helpful.
If you want to see more sample wedding budgets for popular DC wedding venues, I’ve previously written about Decatur House wedding costs, DAR wedding costs, Woodend Sanctuary wedding costs and Meridian House wedding costs. I also wrote a post about how much different wedding decor pieces cost.
These budgets are meant as a guide to give you an idea of what to expect with pricing in the DC wedding market. Certainly, you can spend more on your priorities and find places to spend less on areas that are less important to you.
Hotel Monaco DC Wedding Budget Sample
This is based on the information I received from the hotel in early 2022. When you add up the first five lines of this budget, the costs from the hotel are 43.4% of the total budget. I am comfortable with this percentage given that it includes all of your food & beverage. This does not include any upgrades like specialty cocktails, late-night snacks, and additional menu items.
The menu package includes a three-course meal, which often includes a dessert, so you could eliminate the wedding cake here. Or you can ask to swap the dessert course for something else, like late-night snacks. I included separate line items for upgraded chairs and linens. The hotel can coordinate this for you, but if you do it yourself (or have your planner do it!) it might be more cost-effective.
I gave you a healthy budget for photography and videography, but you could go higher or lower. I prefer a DJ at Hotel Monaco if your ceremony is also there. The band set up can conflict with the timing of your ceremony, and may take space away from guest seating for the ceremony.
A lot of the weddings I have done at Hotel Monaco were Jewish weddings, so I included a separate line item for the traditional items that you may need.
If you have questions about anything you see here, please reach out!
A Mini Ultimate Guide to Hotel Monaco DC Weddings
Now that we have covered Hotel Monaco DC wedding costs – let’s talk about everything else!
Hotel Monaco DC Wedding Ceremonies
Above, a unique wedding set up where the couple wanted a backdrop but we needed a lot of guest seating. So we installed drape that the wedding party processed from the main doors and then we closed the drapes for the ceremony. We had to open it back up for the recessional.
Below, using drape on the opposite side of the Hotel Monaco skylight creates a beautiful wedding ceremony backdrop. This worked because we only needed to seat about 80 guests for the ceremony. The drape above is set up opposite where you see the drape below set up.
Below, a more typical wedding ceremony set up at Hotel Monaco. Here we see a suspended chuppah for better sightlines for the wedding guests, with delicate threads of hanging flowers and candles instead of the traditional 4 chuppah poles. We used floral arrangements on pillars to better mark the ceremony aisle (and we used those florals on the dinner tables later.)
Above, you see a large chuppah set up in the Athens Ballroom. For this wedding, we had the cocktail hour first, in the Paris Ballroom, then guests went to Athens for the ceremony. After the ceremony, guests walked back to Athens, where we had flipped the room for dinner. We did need to ensure that the staff and vendors had a full hour for the flip, so we delayed the start of the ceremony by a few minutes.
Hotel Monaco DC Wedding Receptions
Typically after the ceremony, guests will go to the Athens Ballroom for the 60-minute cocktail reception while we flip the Paris Ballroom for the wedding dinner reception. I build in 10 minutes on each side of cocktail hour to move the guests around the building, and we do need a full 60 minutes to flip the room and take room photos.
When guests arrive back in the Paris Ballroom, they will oooh and aaah at the room transformation.
Above, you see ghost chairs and chivari chairs rented for the wedding reception. The chivari chairs run from $7-10 each, plus you can assume about $250 in delivery fees. The ghost chairs are about double the costs of the chivaris.
Below you will see the banquet chairs that live at the Hotel Monaco. In the bottom photo the chairs look darker, but it is just a feature of photo editing.
I hope you have found this post about Hotel Monaco DC wedding costs helpful to your wedding planning. If you have any questions for me, about the Hotel Monaco or any other DC-area venue, please email me. I would love to help you cut down the learning curve of wedding budgets! You can also fill out this form and I will send you a rough budget custom to your specifications!
