Wedding guests pay £300. Plus £170 for the stag/hen do!

By the time he walks his little girl down the aisle, the average father of the bride will have come to terms with the £17,000 he has had to fork out for the wedding - he had, after all, been expecting it for years.

But for the assembled guests looking on from the pews, the personal cost of attending may not be something they had bargained for.

It costs each guest £300 on average to attend a wedding, a study has found. Added together, an average 100 guests spend £30,000 on the special day - far more than the father of the bride.

That is £90 on travel and accommodation, more than £30 each on alcohol, and £50-plus on a gift for the happy couple.

Then of course, there is a new outfit to think about. On average, guests spend £84.70 on this, with £9.20 on a hat to top it off, the survey for the debit card Maestro showed.

Factor in an extra £170 for attending the stag or hen night, and it all starts to seem a bit much.

"We'd love to attend," reply the wedding-goers with sometimes forced glee, as their wallets and holiday allowances take the strain in peak wedding season.

But how many of them would go so far as re-wrapping a gift that had been given to them? Ten per cent, the research shows.

The most sought after gift remains traditional cutlery or crockery. But the best gift is not necessarily the most expensive one, said Nigel Turner, the marketing director of Maestro UK.

"Weddings have always been a time to splash out, but we believe that it is important to budget sensibly while still joining in the celebration and merriment.

"Low cost gifts can often mean as much to the happy couple as an expensive one. For example, filming the ceremony and turning it into an everlasting gift will not only save you money but will also ensure that the bride and groom do not forget your contribution as soon as the honeymoon is over," he said.

Those in the North-East are the most wedding fashion-conscious, spending £40 more than the national average on their outfits. Londoners, it seems, are the most generous guests to invite, spending an average £10 more on wedding gifts.

Men are more generous than women when buying wedding gifts. They spend on average £65, while women spend less than £50, the research showed.

Women are twice as likely to scour the wedding list for the cheapest item, and are three times more likely than men to find their gift on the internet auction site eBay.

Men also spend more than women on the married-to-be's send-off - with the average stag night costing each person £185, £30 more than the average hen night.

But it is not all bad news for wedding-goers.

While love is in the air, guests could be buying in to romance for themselves, as well as the bride and groom, the survey of 1,200 people by Experian showed.

Researchers calculated that 1.4 million Britons had met their partner at a wedding, a romantic potential helping to offset the costs.

So £300 each - the price of a weekend away, a must-have hat, and celebrating and finding love.

A bargain, really.