At Four Seasons, a Faux Wedding with Real Stakes
When the Four Seasons Hotel opened in downtown Minneapolis two summers ago, it was counting on a certain mix of revenue. But business travel and events were in structural decline, driven by Covid’s lingering effects and work-from-home. Another missing piece of the revenue pie was weddings. Urban luxury hotels can host as many as 50 weddings a year; in 2023, the Minneapolis Four Seasons hosted three. General manager Florian Riedel tasked senior events sales manager Jess Tober with figuring out why.
Tober, who has worked at Four Seasons from Colorado to England, says one of her first realizations was that Minnesotans tend not to get married at hotels: “They use hotels to house guests, but they don’t think of hotels as a venue.” Tober learned that 80% of Minnesota high-end weddings involved a planner, so she focused on that community.
Kastina Morrison, a wedding planner and venue consultant at Bigger Picture Solutions, told TCB that Four Seasons had issues both specific and general. “Zales did a study and found that because people weren’t meeting partners in 2020 and early 2021 the engagement cycle, which lasts two to three years, was disrupted.” She says urban hotels are also competing with newly vacant downtown commercial spaces in search of any revenue stream. But she told Tober the hotel faced other challenges specific to this market.
“Having a wedding at your lake home is three times the cost,” Morrison explains, “but people feel it looks modest, homey. The Four Seasons looks flashy, expensive, and Minnesotans don’t like to project that way.” Also, she notes, Minnesotans really like to get married outdoors, in natural settings.
Tober decided to market directly to planners and invited a group of 17 to the hotel on a Wednesday in April for everything but the nuptials. “We greeted them by name, offered them massages, saunas, a Champagne welcome reception. We had photographers doing headshots, because who couldn’t use a new professional headshot?” Tober says. Then came an Alice in Wonderland-themed foraging dinner—Tober describes it “like falling out of a dream into a forest.” Next was a private dessert buffet at the hotel’s sleek indoor pool, an overnight in a $600 (rack rate) room, and breakfast in the presidential suite.
“I asked them, what do we need to do to get your clients to consider us?” says Tober. “Within minutes of them leaving I was getting inquiries.”
Morrison’s takeaways: “Service levels [there] are the finest in town—choreographed, elevated. There is nothing like it.” It’s not a cheap date, but Morrison says many pay more for weddings that deliver less at venues that assume a sunny day and lakefront make the memories. She believes once the “engagement gap” closes, the Four Seasons will be doing 40 weddings a year. Tober says she would be satisfied with 16.
