Couple defend charging wedding guests $333 each to attend ceremony
Topics: Weddings, Money, Social Media
Joe Yates
Featured Image Credit: ABC 7 Chicago/Nova Styles
Topics: Weddings, Money, Social Media
It's a dangerous world when you hear that guests are being charged to attend weddings.
No one wants to be billed for someone else's big day, especially if you have spent thousands on a ceremony of your own for people to enjoy.
Who could, and would, do such a thing?
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Well, Nova and Reemo Styles did just that - charging friends and family $333 for entry to their service... but it isn't actually as awful as it may sound, and for those with huge families it may be a life-saving idea.
The influencers, whose account handle across all social media platforms is @thestylesfamilia, tied the knot at St Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, in June last year and they came up with the scheme to make it a ticketed event among those they hold dear.
The 30-year-olds both have large families and so initially planned to invite 350 guests to their big day, but feared that with so many people they wouldn't get to speak to everyone present.
Instead they decided they were going to whittle the list down to just 60 - but how do you cut 290 people who would all feel they hold the right to be there?
To weed out just the people who truly wanted to be present, they came up with the ingenious idea of ticketing their guests.
Speaking to FOX, Nova defended their decision. She said: "Instead of thinking about everyone else, we said, ‘What do we want? What do we want to do?’
"So that's how the ticket idea came up, because we said we can't choose anyone.
"How are we going to choose one aunt over another aunt? Like there's no way we could do that."
But why did they drastically cut so many guests?
Nova envisioned her wedding to be contemporary rather than your standard traditional church ceremony and gathering at a large venue for the reception.
She wanted to tour the city visiting some of its biggest attractions, the New Yorkers wanted to be tourists for the day - visiting Hudson Yards, the Supreme Courthouse and One World Trade Center - where the Twin Towers once stood.
To do so they hired a party bus - that could only seat 60 people.
Their wedding cost in excess of $70,000 so they'd receive just shy of $20,000 from guests - a welcome input surely?
Not for the Styles family, who instead told the TV outlet that all the proceeds would go towards a charity supporting couples struggling with infertility.
Reemo added: "We really wanted people who really want to go, for us."