I've heard so many different versions of this story over the years (the closest being the mutants that start with Posh and Becks buying up venues for their wedding). 50K says this one is just another descendant of the original urban myth. Funnily enough, across the variants I've heard, the pay-off is almost always 50K. You'd have thought that it would be the most obvious element to tinker with.

Well, they did book the entire hotel — you couldn't even go there for dinner on Wednesday — so it's not unlikely that they had to bribe one or two people to change their bookings. But I was suspicious of the wedding part of the story, simply because it was a Wednesday.