Who would have thought that gifting someone a free trip would bite you back?

This couple decided to pay the trip cost for every guest at their wedding but the bride’s friend got offended at the offer.

Find out how things got worse!

AITA for covering the cost of travel for my wedding guests?

Ever since my (30F) and my now husband (31M) got together, we talked about how we both wanted a small wedding in the city we met, New Orleans.

We both went to school there, but we live on the East Coast now.

This is where it gets interesting…

We’re both very fortunate to have careers that pay us extremely well. So we knew we could have the wedding of our dreams.

My husband’s best friend from college owns a jazz club in NOLA and told us we could have our wedding there for free. We both chose vintage rings that didn’t cost nearly as much as we budgeted for.

They wanted to do something for the guests…

My dress and his tux were both second hand from an amazing thrift store near us. We didn’t choose anything crazy for cake, flowers, decorations, etc.

We’re not very materialistic people. Because of this, we had a lot of our wedding budget left over.

With the remainder of our budget, we decided to cover all the travel expenses for our 20 out of state guests.

TUH OH…

Including plane tickets, hotel, meals at the restaurants we wanted to take them to, my bridesmaids’ dresses, his groomsmen’s suits.

We really didn’t want any of our guests to put themselves out for our wedding. Especially since we chose to have it in a different state. We surprised them with this and there was a lot of tears and it was really sweet.

Fast forward to the day before everyone was supposed to leave for NOLA, I got a text from one of my guests, my close friend from college.

That’s INSANE!

She said after a lot of thinking, her and her husband found it inappropriate of us to have surprised them with covering their travel expenses.

She said they felt offended that I assumed the couldn’t pay for it, and they felt uncomfortable being “controlled” like that. So they wouldn’t be attending I was genuinely just shocked.

I couldn’t deal with that so close to my wedding, so my amazing bridesmaids handled it for me.

She was not expecting that from her friend!

I even asked some of my other guests if they felt the same way, but everyone said no. Their plane and hotel tickets were nonrefundable and we got everyone custom gifts, so theirs are just sitting in my house now.

Luckily, the wedding was absolutely amazing. Genuinely the best day of my life.

I’m just so at a loss about this.

She’s not sure how to tackle this.

My sister said I should bill them for the money I lost, but I don’t know if that would be appropriate. Should I apologize for springing it on them and explain I didn’t mean to offend them?

We just feel like it would’ve been inappropriate of us to expect our guests to spend a bunch of money on our wedding when we’re fortunate enough to cover it.

AITA?

GEEZ! That’s so weird!

Why wouldn’t the friend appreciate the effort?

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user knows that this girl is probably not even a good friend.

That’s right! This user thinks it is absurd that this girl got mad about a free trip.

This user knows the deal!

This user thinks it was very generous of this girl to fund everyone’s trip.

This user knows that the couple acted very weirdly about the money here.

Someone’s being really weird here!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.