I spent $1,500 on a friend's bachelor party after he insisted I attend and now I'm uninvited to the wedding. Can I ask him to pay me back?

Let’s pretend, for example, that Ben was asked to help organize a bachelor party for a friend and after renting an Airbnb, paying for an expensive dinner and drinks and covering other costs, he spent a shocking $1,500.

Unfortunately, Ben was later uninvited to the wedding because the venue could only hold a limited number of people and an unexpectedly high number of people in the bride’s extended family RSVPed yes.

Now, Ben is very upset that he’s out the $1,500 and isn’t sure if he should ask for it back. Unfortunately, the situation is tricky and experts are divided on what to do next.

The groom was clearly in the wrong

While opinions are mixed on whether Ben should ask for a refund, etiquette experts are unanimous in the position that the groom committed a major faux pas.

“Good etiquette isn’t simply knowing which fork to use. It’s about consideration, graciousness and not treating people as disposable. If you invite someone to the pre-wedding festivities, particularly when significant time and money are involved, you don’t tell them there’s no room for them at the wedding. Period,” Lisa Mirza Grotts, founder of Golden Rules Gal, told Moneywise.

In fact, uninviting Ben isn’t just a minor mistake. “The technical etiquette term for what’s happened here is ‘bonkers,’” Nick Leighton, etiquette expert at Were You Raised By Wolves? told Moneywise. “Uninviting someone to your wedding is one of the most serious and consequential decisions someone can make. The solution here was to find a different venue, not uninvite people who already made plans to be there.”

Leighton believes the invitation is a “social contract” that was broken, while EtiquetteExpert.Org founder Jo Hayes agrees the groom was 100% in the wrong. “To un-invite a guest is to be avoided at all costs, especially if they have forked out significant expense for the bachelor party and, in doing so, demonstrated great interest in your nuptials,” Hayes told Moneywise.

A refund probably isn’t in the cards

Although there’s little justification for the groom’s actions, whether Ben can, or should, ask for his money back is more of a gray area.

“To ask someone to spend all of this money for a pre-wedding function, only to rip the invitation back is in very poor taste,” Danielle Rothweiler, owner and lead wedding planner at Rothweiler Event Design, said. Rothweiler believes Ben is well within his rights to “ask for financial compensation, because it’s not like the couple had no idea what the guest capacity was.”

Grotts agrees that it’s worth a conversation, even if Ben doesn’t end up with a refund. “Would I ask for the $1,500 back? It was bad judgment. I think the guest is justified in raising the issue without the expectation that every dollar spent on the bachelor party is reimbursable,” she said.

However, both Hayes and Leighton are against asking for a refund.

“As tempting as it is, you can’t ask for the money back, although it would be awfully nice of the groom to reimburse this person unprompted,” Leighton said, while Hayes commented, “Unfortunately, no, you can’t ask for your $1,500 back,” in part because, as Hayes explained of the groom, “unless he’s super cashed up, he’s likely in no position to reimburse you the $1,500.”

“This is one of those things in life where you have to write it off as a ‘bad debt’ so to speak,” Hayes said.