It just seems that over the last 20+ years, people keep coming up with new ideas to spend other peoples money and make weddings much more expensive. When I and my friends were getting married 35 years ago, you gave the chasan and kallah an engagement gift and a wedding gift and that was it. Sheva brachos was a simple affair, in the home mainly entailing having a minyan for benching. When we made a Shabbos sheva brachos for our daughter 12 years ago, we kept the cost down and never dreamt of asking our guests to pay for their meal.
Over time, parents began paying for lechaims, then elaborate vorts , and now hachnasat kallas. After the wedding, chas vesholom you should have a low-cost sheva brochos in the house. Now they have to be elaborate, costly affairs themselves that guests are asked to pay for. When you add the costs of the “freebies”( the choson & kallah, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles etc ) , it can run $50-$75 a person. If you have to pay, you are not a guest. For this reason, we now politely decline invitations to sheva brochos.
The latest imposition is this latest shtus of asking the parents to pay for transportation. Why stop there? Why not aslk the parents to pay to have my suit dry-cleaned, to have my wife’s sheitel done up, and even pay for baby-sitting? Where does it end?