A bride-to-be got some bad news last week about a block of rooms she’d reserved at a Howard Johnson Inn in St. Augustine — they had all been given away to Mumford & Sons fans and there was nothing that could be done about it.

The St. Augustine Record reports that the bride had reserved the block of rooms back in September, a full year in advance of her upcoming wedding.

Then earlier this month, the popular band with all those guys playing mandolins, banjos, and other stringed instruments announced tour dates. These included a stop in St. Augustine, which meant that fans from all around began snapping up downtown hotel rooms so they would have a place to stay that weekend.

And a number of those 25,000 Mumford fans went online to book rooms at the HoJo, somehow overriding the reservations made by the engaged couple.

“We did not even realize it,” the hotel manager tells the Record. “Sometimes the computers don’t update the inventory (right away). Her room block was somehow released to a different group.”

“As a sign of good faith, I tried to make her aware of my situation here well in advance,” says the manager. “I told her, ‘I want to make sure your wedding is the highest priority to me.’”

So of course the manager simply contacted the people who had booked the rooms that should not have been given away and — Oh wait, no she didn’t. Because the rooms for that weekend were now going for $250/night, as opposed to the $60 rate the wedding guests would have paid.

No, rather than honor the months-old reservations, the manager apologized to the bride-to-be and got her some rooms five miles away at a Days Inn.

This means the wedding guests will no longer be in St. Augustine’s historic district, nor will they be able to travel to and from the festivities by trolley.

“It didn’t even cross my mind that a hotel would do business like that,” says the Florida woman.

And though you and I might be burning Mumford & Sons in effigy, the bride-to-be is a bit more understanding.

She says, “If they want to play at our wedding because of all the trouble they’ve caused… It’s not their fault.”

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