Ask the Old Events Guy is a column for people who work in events. Each week a question arrives, and I answer it from a few decades in the business, with sources where I have them and a clear label where I’m guessing. Some letters come from readers. Others are composites, marked as such. I’m not trying to sound young. I’m trying to be useful
Dear Old Events Guy,
A vendor I booked twice now quietly offered me a personal cut if I book them again.
Nobody said the word kickback, but that’s what it was. Everyone I’ve mentioned this to just shrugs like it’s normal.
Signed, Kickback in KC.
Dear Kickback in KC,
It depends which side of the industry you’re standing in, and almost nobody explains that part. Weddings.
This is close to an open secret. Referral commissions of five to 20% are documented as common, sometimes 30 to 40 for exclusive vendor spots.
Disclosed to a client, that’s a normal business relationship. Undisclosed, it’s a kickback and in states like Texas and California, it’s not a gray area. It’s illegal. On the corporate side, it runs more formally.
Hotel commissions are usually a disclosed line item, and the industry’s own ethics codes explicitly ban undisclosed personal gain. Better paperwork, not necessarily more [00:01:00] honest. Here’s the part that should worry you as prices go up everywhere. A padded fifteen percent hides perfectly inside a year where everything’s already more expensive.
Inflation doesn’t create the kickback. It just makes the evidence disappear into noise that was already there for honest reasons. Want to actually fight it? Texas already requires the commission to be written into the contract as a number.
Do that voluntarily wherever you are, and you’ve done more than any code of ethics has ever done.
The Old Events Guy
