Help with booking the venue

Welcome - we're a September 2011 couple too.

If you're looking at a saturday wedding the chances are you won't get much wiggle room on prices because they know they can sell it at that price to someone else if you don't take it - if you were having a Tuesday in February then you'd have a lot more luck!

Are you planning on having the ceremony in a licensed venue, with afternoon and evening reception all in the same place, or a church wedding followed by an evening do somewhere?

Most places on a saturday will insist you have the Wedding Breakfast in the afternoon there too (most WB's are drastically overpriced like most wedding related things).

One way to save money may be looking at the drinks package they offer - our place's house wine starts at £16.50 a bottle! We are having a non-alcoholic package of shloer at basically cost price to them which saves a lot of money, but there's a pay bar that'll be open so if people want alcohol they can buy their own. Don't have an "open bar" which you pay the tab for because if it's a large wedding they'll rack up a bill of thousands of pounds in no time!

One thing to check is the evening buffet menu, some places "allow" you to only cater for 80% of your evening guests so that might save a couple of hundred.

Check what extras you're getting in the price - you may find you're paying for things you don't need and may be able to knock the price down if, say, you decorate the room yourself.

Also check your venue's maximum and minimum afternoon and evening numbers as you may find that you can cater for 40 for the overpriced wedding breakfast and 100 for the evening at £12 a head for the buffet - rather than paying another £3000 to feed everyone in the afternoon too.

Negotiating with venues is notoriously hard as if you don't want to pay their costs some of them go with the line of someone else will so it will depend on how much you want x date and y venue to how much you can negotiate. If you have a mon-thurs wedding then it seems to be much easier than fri, sat, or sun

If you are having a registrar it would be worth checking to see what availability they have before you go venue searching same with churches

Some venues still consider September part of the "summer season" and hike their prices accordingly, so it may well be worth asking whether October is any cheaper.

Of course to balance that you have a slightly higher risk of crap weather on the day and a little less ambient light, but that more depends on whether you want lots of group photos outside (and of course the time of your wedding - checking with the registrars was mentioned above) but a decent photographer should be able to cope with that no problem.

Thanks for your responses.

Yes we're looking to have a civil ceremony with everything in the one place if we find somewhere suitable. I'd prefer to go with a Saturday wedding just because I don't want people to have to take the day off work but may consider a Friday if it works out considerably cheaper.

I'd like to go with October as it correspondends with the anniversary of when we first met and i've seen that several places offer a discount for out of season but I know hubby2b would like September just to have more of a chance of better weather.

Hi, it all depends on the venue and how 'flexible' they are. We tried cutting catering costs, so instead of a 3 course wedding menu we are serving the wedding cake as dessert. This has dramatically cut our costs, we have ordered an extra nice wedding cake that everyone will love but will help our budget somewhat!

We managed to negotiate prices and some venues often charge foor things such as: laying tables and putting on favours etc. Our venue does all of that in with the exclusive price. My friend gets married next year and has been estimated a massive £700 to put a few favours and to dress the table and chairs!

As for the drinks package, our venue works however we want to buy the drinks, either by the bottle or glasses, whichever works out cheaper. Sometimes (depending on how much they charge you corkage) its worth buying your own wine.. like Asda 3 for £10, its much nicer than the house wine they serve anyway!

Hi,

I'm getting married on 29th October 2011 which is a Saturday. We didn't really negotiate on price as the venue had already agreed to waive their minimum numbers policy (usually minimum of 75 guests for wedding breakfast and 100 for evening do) as it is 'out of season'.

As we wanted a smaller wedding of 50-60 people this already seemed like a massive discount to us as effectively we are getting a larger venue who usually can request minimum numbers to maximise their profit, for a lot less than they would usually 'hire' it out for, if you see what I mean. We also still have no minimum either so whether we have 50 or 60 guests, this is fine with them!

Final thing to say is, we had decided on the venue, provisionally 'held' a date with them (at no cost) until we could revisit on their wedding fayre day to see it all set up for a wedding day, fully intending to then book that day and pay the deposit. Booked on the day, paid deposit and when we got the conract and invoice through a week later it said 'I have also applied the 20% discount that you received for booking at the wedding fayre' ?

Neither of us realised we would get this discount for booking on that day and this saved us jus under £2,000. We were over the moon. Maybe something worth asking about / looking into if you like a venue that has a similar 'promotional' day on. We also found some good suppliers on that day who had good discounts for that day only. But emailing them after the fayre saying that that was where we saw them then promoted them to honour the discount that was available on the day.

So far we have not paid full price for anything but maybe by luck rather than by design. I think the October date helps a lot with this though.

Hope that helps.