The St. Julien and the Boulderado were great about the welcome bags, no charge! The Marriott on the other hand was a pain in the ass, and the girl at the front desk wasn’t very efficient at all. I understand that she wanted to make sure that she had marked on people’s reservations that they had bags, but did I really have to be there and confirm each one twice?! It took 20 minutes!
Bag breakdown:
- canvas tote bag with homemade/printed iron-on logo (please don’t sue us, REI!)
- welcome note/map of downtown Boulder, inc. directions to the synagogue
- home-made flyer on altitude sickness awareness
- vanilla mint chapstick (SPF 15)
- 1 oz tube of Rocky Mountain Sunscreen (SPF 30 with TiO2)
- 1 bottle of water pp (w/ customized label)
- 1 snack-size bag of Boulder Canyon potato chips pp
- 4 york peppermint patties pp
- 2 caramels pp
- 1 candy corn pp
- 4 flavors of tea per bag
- 2 glittery bandaids per bag
- tourist map of downtown
- hiking/biking trail map of Boulder
- map of public parking in downtown Boulder
- assorted flyers (Dushambe tea house, Celestial Seasonings tea factory, NCAR museum, FISK planetarium, Boulder Creek winery, etc.)
Total cost per bag:
less than $9, including delivery fees
yes, that’s more than we planned to spend, but since there ended up being fewer people than we’d planned for, it still fit within our budget. I’m not sure that the bags would have been quite so elaborate if everyone had been able to come out to Boulder 2 weeks ago.
Custom water bottles were made from Costco water bottles with the labels peeled off. We printed our own labels on waterproof shipping labels and cut them with the paper cutter. It only took me about 90 minutes to modify 4 flats of water.
Let me know if you have any questions about anything else I included in the bags and I’ll elaborate.
Did you know that they actually gave me the wrong bag at the Marriot? I got one for “Katie and Justin’s” wedding, haha. But I had already devoured the cookies in that bag before I realized it was the wrong one, so I just didn’t tell them :-)
are you kidding me?! then you didn’t get your tote bag from me? sad panda!