Venue AC is broken….5 days before the wedding

Edit to add: Well, the wedding happened……sans air conditioning. The venue called us the Tuesday before our Saturday wedding to say that it was fixed, the engineering team was confident it would work, and that the room was comfortable when they went in. We pushed back to say that there’s a big difference between comfort in an empty room and comfort in a room with candles and 100+ people, and we were right. The AC couldn’t keep up and by dinner and toasts it was WARM. Half of our dance floor photos will have handheld fans in them because we were just desperately trying not to drip sweat everywhere while still enjoying ourselves. TBD on if the venue plans to do anything to make it right…..

As the title states, we got a call from our venue (a harborside hotel in SoCal) that the AC isn’t working in the venue. They (and us) are hopeful that it can be fixed in the next five days, but in the meantime they did offer a few alternative spaces.

The problem is that one of the alternative spaces is outdoors, which we explicitly didn’t want to do because we wanted air conditioning for our guests to be comfortable. The other alternative space is a large outdoor tent that, while air conditioned, can accommodate a guest count 5X our size, so we’ll look absurdly small if we move. We can also keep the reception in our original space and just hope that opening the windows will keep it cool enough.

I’m trying to be polite about it, but it definitely throws a huge wrench in our plans. We picked our reception space because it’s on the second floor and has a better view, and it’s the perfect size for our guest count so we fill out the space without being too squished. I know things happen and we’re lucky that they have alternate options available to offer us if they can’t get the AC fixed, but I’m still a little peeved.

Would it be fair to ask for a discount if we have to pivot? Our contract doesn’t say anything about AC, but if we have to move to a different space because it’s not a comfortable temperature, would the venue technically have breached the contract by not having our agreed-upon space available? If so, what would be fair to ask from them? The reception space technically doesn’t cost anything because it’s built into the per person food cost and the food/beverage minimum, but our ceremony space (which is outdoors so we will stick with that space for sure) is $3,000. Would it be fair to ask for the ceremony space rental fee to be waived if we have to move the reception?