My Madonna Inn Wedding Budget Recap
Hi all - wanted to share my experience getting married at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, our spaces, schedule, budget, and vendors. If you want me to forward you their pricing packages, please just DM me!
Overall: Madonna Inn events provides a great planning experience. They're super flexible, kind, and responsive. Lots of different spaces to achieve different looks based on what you want.
Spaces: We had reception and welcome party in the Secret Garden, ceremony in the main ballroom, and farewell breakfast in the Garden Room.
Secret Garden: Beautiful, but windy. Even if you tell your guests to bring jackets they will forget. If you have menus or other paper goods on your tablescape, figure out a way to weigh them down. I put my place cards on my favor bags and put them on top of menus. Place card clips would also work. Also gets very dark very quickly (hill in back of Inn makes sun "set" earlier). Get plenty of uplights, the string lights don't do the job. Also, they don't let you use the heart shape sweetheart table or famous Madonna Inn goblets out here.
Main Ballroom: Perfect place to get married. If you have over 100 people, some will be seated in the Gay 90s room next door which has a somewhat obstructed view. I came down the grand staircase with my dad and everyone else came from the restaurant behind for the processional.
Garden Room: Great for breakfast, would also recommend for a reception of 100 people or less. Round room next door is good for dancing. You get the heart shape table and various color goblets.
Schedule: We were able to fit in a bunch of different events and experiences to make the weekend work. We also picked SLO because the local airport (SBP) has regular nonstop flights from most of the places our friends were coming from.
Friday: 11 am pickleball tournament (we got two pickleball sets on amazon, they have one there; courts are first-come, first-serve, so just get people out there early), unplanned pool party from like 1 pm - 4 pm (we wrapped up pickleball at 12:30pm ish and the weather was nice), 5 pm welcome party
Saturday: 4 pm ceremony; hair and makeup for 10 people started at 8:30 am. I was done by 2:30, took some bridals, up in the vestibule waiting for ceremony to start at 3:15. Something to note about wind: it ripped out my veil and stole it. The kind people at the Madonna Inn got it back for me off the roof of the hotel, but be sure to pin your veil if you get married here. Partied in Secret Garden until 10, then hung out at the bar until midnight.
Sunday: 11 am farewell breakfast. Everyone was happy.
Budget: We were able to accomplish all this for 155 guests serving only beer and wine for under $70k.
Flowers: $5k + tip - Mark Dillon Luna - order minimum for Mark was $3,500 but I increased budget to get a garland on the banister as I walked down, robust ceremony florals, and gorgeous reception florals. He also dropped off some florals for welcome party at no extra cost. Highly recommend.
Photography: $6k + tip - Noranna Photo (her cover photo is a detail shot from our wedding hehe). She photographed our engagement and some portraits, plus our wedding. Love her and love her work - she captured everyone incredibly. Highly recommend.
Hair and makeup: $5k + tip - Janay Beauty - Included welcome party/rehearsal dinner makeup, HMU for up to 12 people, touchups, look change. Had to source her from outside SLO because no one in SLO had any POC in their reference photos and my bridesmaids were already dropping out before I even hired someone because they didn't trust the color match. She did fkn amazing. Cannot recommend enough.
DJ: $3,500 + tip - Epic Entertainment - Ask for Jack. Followed our requests to a tee and set up a livestream for us to get my out of town family in for the ceremony. Highly recommend.
Planning: $2,000 + tip - Events by Krissy - experts in Madonna Inn event execution and well known to the internal Madonna Inn team. Because I'm a planner myself, I knew I'd need a coordinator, and Krissy and Dee did a great job.
Wine: $5,000 - Zanoli Wines - family friends who we love working with. They helped us customize a wine menu to fit with our meal and events. We didn't love any of the offerings at Madonna (and liquor was $9/drink) so we went external and paid the $20 corkage. Everyone was raving about how great the wine was so I consider it a win.
F&B: Approx $50k all in - Madonna Inn doesn't allow external vendors for food and beverage besides wine for corkage fee. All food packages are really reasonably prices (lowest is $65 for dinner, highest is $119, includes custom Madonna Inn wedding cake). Includes
$1250 Main Ballroom ceremony fee
$1600 Secret Garden rental fee (welcome and reception)
No rental fee for Garden Room (indoor room rental fees waived with banquet purchase for 25+ people)
$80/pp second highest package with +3.50 pp custom cake upgrade
Paper: Approx $1,500 - Did all my paper (StD, invite suite, day-of, thank yous, etc.) myself on Adobe Express with a local printer. Email Bill at HH Printing if you're in the Bay Area and want high quality letterpress and foil printing for a good deal.
Recommendations:
Do an inside reception if you can fit people into the Garden Room. The food got cold doing buffet style outdoors for 155 people. Everyone liked the Santa Maria barbecue menu, though!
Pin your veil and make sure any loose items aren't truly loose!!
Have a great time and get as many people as possible to stay on site! It's a super fun venue and it felt like we were at a summer camp with all of our best friends and we loved it.
Best of luck to everyone on their wedding planning journeys, I hope this helps someone somewhere somehow!