Booking venue or registrar first?

I spoke to the venue to make sure the date I wanted was available then booked with the registrar as there is no point booking the venue if the registrar isn't available, as soon as I'd booked with her I confirmed with the venue.

I booked them within a couple of days of each other. My venue allowed me to be 'pencilled in' for 48 hours whilst I contacted the registrar and secured that.

Most would say don't book the venue until you are sure your registrar will attend but the difficulty can be that in some districts, the registrars won't take bookings until a year before at the earliest, whereas popular venues may become booked before that! In those situations if you are set on the venue, you book that first and put a note in your diary to call the registrar bang on a year before the date!

My venue said to book with them and they contact the registrar and book the date for you.

Thats in Scotland though so no doubt its totally different for England and Wales.

Any half decent venue will hold your preferred date for a couple of weeks to enable you to make sure a registrar is available. Don't be swayed by "book now and receive a special discount" because you can more or less guarantee that it'll be available in a week or two's time too.

What AJ said, preliminarily book the venue, then see if the registrar is free, if yes, book them and confirm with the venue.

For us, it was more important that we got the time we wanted rather than a specific date. So I checked out all dates over.next sumner that my venue had available, then went to the registry office to see what dates had the time we wanted. I called the hotel.from bhe registry office, confirmed the date with them, then drove round the corned.to the hotel and signed on the date with them too. A bit OTT I know, but I'm a bit of a control freak lol

x

We could only book the registrar a year before but when we looked at venues about 18 months before we got the only Saturday left in September- the entire summer was booked up!

We had to just hope that we could get a registar on the day and luckily we did- I did howver take the day off work and call them as soon as they opened...just in case ?

Different counties work different ways. My local registrars will take a booking when you book the venue - the venues notify the registrars directly. Then you can give notice up to 1 year ahead, but they recommend 3-6 months just in case you have to delay for any reason - the notice is valid for 1 year.

WSS

Hi,

Thanks everyone! This is exactly what I had planned to do but was thrown by the message from the hotel! We're going to visit venues on the 9th/10th/11th October so will hopefully find something lovely!!! I've ordered lots of brochures and can't wait to get them this week!!

Have a good evening!!

Yes.It's not a silly question️?️

It's very useful tips for the wedding couples and the better choice for wedding planner to follow.Thanks for sharing the information.

In my district the venue send paperwork off to the registrar to arrange the necessary. Then the registrar confirm receipt of this info directly to you to pay the registrar deposit and details on the remaining procedures/balance.

I would secure a venue first - chance is registrars will be available anyhow x

We provisionally booked the venue, then called the church to provisionally book, then paid the deposit to the venue and the church to secure both.

We were told we could only book 1 year in advance, we called up bang on one year in advance and they had already booked all 4 of the 2pm slots, then they had added an additional 2 2pm slots and booked them out as well! We still got a slot, 12pm, just not the one we wanted! We were stunned at how quickly it booked up!

We were able to hold our wanted date for two weeks before we made a final decision and whilst we contacted our vicar. As it was, in the end i'd accidentally checked the wrong date with the vicar so had to make a mad phone call in the middle of signing the booking forms just to double check he could marry us on the right date. Luckily we were fine!

We had booked the venue, but the registrar wouldnt take any bookings unless it was 12 months or under so just bombarded the phone until i got our time