Experts Weigh In on Disputed Hotel Wedding Bar Tab

It goes without saying that weddings can be extremely expensive, especially at Southern California’s more glamorous hotels.

But while expense is one thing, overcharging is another. That is the point at issue in the dispute between one bride’s mother, dubious about the bar bill run up at her daughter’s wedding, and the Doubletree hotel in Pasadena, which levied the charge.

It comes down, finally, to a conflict over the average number of drinks the guests consumed. But, of course, there are other factors, including the sort of guests who attended, the price of varying brands and even, possibly, theft of bottles.

“For me, this is an ethical issue,” said Chris Wagner, a businesswoman from the La Canada area, who on March 6 hosted a wedding for her daughter, Elizabeth, and son-in-law Mike at the Doubletree.

She said she and her husband could afford to pay all bills, but will not pay an excessive one.

Wagner has asked her credit card company, a bank, to withhold payment on a $3,500 charge that arrived 11 days after the wedding, bringing the bar bill for 137 guests to more than $6,000, including service and taxes.

She paid about $11,000 in other hotel wedding charges, for the dinner and so on, without protest.

“What I take exception to is being ripped off,” she remarked of the bar bill dispute. “I don’t like to be taken advantage of.”

But the hotel insists its bill was not out of line. Its general manager, John Lange, said the average consumption among the wedding guests attending the six-hour party and dinner was 6.68 drinks per person, 916 drinks in all. (This apparently excludes a champagne toast billed separately, however.)

The 6.68 is “below the industry average,” Lange said.

But Wagner asserts that since about one in five of the guests were children or very old people who drank little, with the champagne toast the average billed was actually more than nine drinks per consuming person.

Moreover, the bar bill was more than $2,500 above what the hotel’s catering director, Janet Babb, estimated it would be just three days before the wedding.

Lange confirmed this, and said he could not understand why Babb estimated so low. Babb did not respond to phone calls, referring my queries to her superiors.

Wagner wrote to Babb on March 19, “If our guests had drunk that much they would have been face down under the table.”

In fact, Wagner said, and Lange later agreed, the guests as a group did not become inebriated.

“Janet,” Wagner wrote to Babb, “you know the kind of affair this was. . . . At least 50% of the attendees are my contemporaries. They simply do not consume like this. . . .

“I would guess that many bottles of wine went home with someone--as did the champagne which was supposed to be in my daughter’s suite (and wasn’t). . . . This is making what should have been a wonderful memory very distasteful.”

Babb did not respond to the letter, and there was no response from the hotel to Wagner until after I contacted it on April 14.

Then there was lots of response, both to me and to Wagner.

Lange said that to avoid such disputes, “We do an inventory of the liquor going into the event and of the liquor going out. . . . It’s a good check and balance to be sure my staff is honest.”

There is no question here, Lange said, of any theft by employees.

Emphasizing the average consumption figure of 6.68 per guest, exclusive of the champagne toast, he said there is “a tendency at such an event to get a cocktail, set it down, forget where it is, go back and get another.”

I still had a feeling the average Lange gave was a little too high.

But when I checked with a trio of experts I trust--two leading Los Angeles restaurateurs, who for years have served wedding parties, and a leading caterer--all three expressed a view that the average provided by Lange was not just a little high, but very high.

“It’s absolutely not a credible number,” said one restaurateur. “If it were credible, they’d have sent every guest home inebriated. I never see an average go over 3.5 drinks a person, and it usually runs under 3.”

The second was more cautious. It is possible some guests did set down half a drink and then order a new one, he said. Also, it may have been warm in the room and young people may have drunk excessively.

Still, he said, Lange’s average “sounds astronomical. Ladies don’t drink as much as men. Realistically, I would say the average, at most, would run five.”

Based on this, he believes the Doubletree should take at least $1,000 off Wagner’s bill.

The caterer called the Doubletree bar bill “outrageous” and said Babb’s $3,500 estimate would have been “an average, accurate charge,” profitable to the hotel. She also said most guests wouldn’t have stayed all six hours.

Taking some off the bill has already been discussed by Wagner and the hotel’s new director of food and beverage, Jim Haupert.

Wagner said she had told Haupert she was willing to pay for five drinks a person and that Haupert “said the five average didn’t sound unreasonable . . . but he didn’t have the authority to do that” without checking with superiors.

Haupert joined Lange in a meeting with me a few days later. There, he denied telling Wagner that the five-drink average “didn’t sound unreasonable.”

Lange said there would be no such compromise.

Summing up the hotel’s position, he said: “When the event has come and gone, when we look at our consumption reports and we determine what went out and subtract what was consumed, someone has to pay.” It should be the customer, not the hotel, he said.

Maybe so, but I have a hunch the hotel may still compromise when its executives meet face to face, maybe next week, with Wagner. With the experts on her side, she is in a good position.

Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060 or by e-mail at: ken.reich@latimes.com