Should they have to accept this lodging situation when the in-laws are paying for it?

Not all financial gifts are given without strings. If your parents pay for all of your wedding expenses, they might want to have a lot of say in exactly how their money is spent. Your mom might insist that you go for a blush and bashful theme because after all, she’s the one paying for it so she should have some say in how it looks. Some parents are more than willing to Zelle their adult children $20K and say, «Here’s your wedding money, go crazy,» but that’s relatively rare. 

If you don’t want your parents to have any say in how you plan your wedding, you should probably plan to pay for your wedding yourself. If you want to have full-control of your family vacation, you need to be the one who plans and pays for it. There’s nothing wrong with accepting an invitation from your in-laws to go on vacation on their dime, but you must do so with the understanding that if they’re paying for it, they have a lot more say than you do. It’s impolite to complain about a hotel room that somebody else is paying for. But what if you never asked your in-laws to pay for the hotel in the first place? What if you were pressured to go on a trip you don’t want to go on and can’t afford to pay for yourself? The young couple in this story didn’t really want to travel out of state to celebrate their father/father-in-laws birthday, but they got roped into it and now they’re being shamed for wanting some privacy.