The Arrabelle at Vail Square Wedding Transportation
Most Arrabelle Square weddings start somewhere else. The ceremony is usually on the Holy Cross Event Deck at the top of Vail Mountain, reached by the Eagle Bahn Gondola, and the gondola loads about 200 yards from the hotel's front door. The reception is back down in the clear top tent on the Square. So the question for a shuttle company is not how to get guests to the Arrabelle, it is how to get them to a gondola load time, which is a harder deadline than a ceremony start.
The gondola is the clock
The deck sells fixed ceremony slots, and the resort runs the ride up and the ride down. Our job finishes at the bottom of the gondola. That means every guest sleeping outside Lionshead needs to be dropped early enough to walk from the Arrabelle porte cochere to the Eagle Bahn and load with the group, and we plan backward from that moment, not from the ceremony time printed on the invitation.
For a 200 person Square wedding with 60 guests in Vail Village hotels, two Sprinters on scheduled departures 75 and 45 minutes ahead of the load time does it, four minutes each way. After the tent closes the same two vans loop between the porte cochere and Vail Village until nobody is left. A block in Avon or Beaver Creek adds 13 or 18 minutes to each leg, so those departures go earlier and we usually give them their own van rather than mixing them into the village runs.
Nobody parks here
Vail Resorts states plainly that there is no on site parking for wedding guests. Lionshead is a pedestrian mall and the nearest structure is a five minute walk. We mention this because it changes how couples should word the invitation: tell people in advance that a van will collect them, or they will arrive in a rental car and circle.
The Arrabelle porte cochere comes off West Lionshead Circle, which in turn comes off the South Frontage Road. It is a short lane meant for loading, shared with Lion Square Lodge, The Hythe and Antlers at Vail traffic on the same circle. Our drivers load and clear it, then hold off the circle between rounds. We have been through that porte cochere about 30 times since 2022, mostly moving hotel guests to and from the airports, so the turn, the lane and where to hold afterward are not new to us. In winter the circle holds packed snow and the turns tighten up, and an all wheel drive Sprinter or SUV is the right tool for that approach, which is what we run.
Which room changes the season
The Square tent is available from the end of May to the middle of October. The ballrooms, which hold 125 to 250, and the Great Room at around 80 seated run all year. A February ballroom wedding at the Arrabelle looks different on our side: no gondola deadline, a shorter day for the vans, and a late return in the cold where we keep the vans close and warm rather than parked across town.
Counting seats
A Sprinter carries 14. The question we ask every Arrabelle couple is whether the outside guests move as one group, which favors scheduled departures with set times, or trickle out of the hotels over an hour, which favors a continuous loop. Most of the time it is scheduled on the way to the gondola and a loop on the way home.
Eagle County Regional is about 38 minutes from Lionshead and Denver is the longer drive over the pass. Guests coming through Denver ride our Denver Airport to Vail lane and are dropped at the same porte cochere.
Send the hotel list, the guest count and the gondola load time and we will build the timetable around it. The place to start is to request an event quote. For the larger picture of how we handle a weekend, see wedding transportation.
