Can you haggle on venue costs?

We got our room hire fee reduced becasue it was a Friday wedding.....

...You could haggle on food - ask for more expensive items to be replaced with cheapers one. Eg: We have King Prawns in filo pastry on our buffet menu - an expensive option but who hardly anyone likes so we are negotiating that off !

If I'm honest I haggle with everything, so yes of course.

Hi,

We got quite a few thousand off of our venue, but it wasnt easy to do. We went to see gosfield hall where we are gettign married and i loved it, whilst we were there my other half kept saying we cant afford it (I knew we coudl and was really embarrassed), any way he said to the woman see what you can do and email me over a quote, well she emailed me literally before we even got home, reducing her prices already, and i wanted to get back to her straight away but my oh (who owns a sales company so is a bot of an expert at this) said whatever you do dont email her back for a few hours. So i eventually emailed her back abd thanked her for the deal but then said no my oh really wont go for this is there nothing else you can do.

She then came back to me 30 minutes later and my 18k quote had gone down to 16k.

a little while after we had paid the deposit my oh then said i think we could have got more off, as we had minimum numbers for meals etc etc so some of our children were being paid as adults and he called them up and said we just couldnt afford it and they reduced theire minimums and our quote then went down to 15k.

i think the general rule is, be flexible on your dates, we was in a position where we was happy to settle for what availability they had, and play it really cool.

Although 15k still seems quite a lot, we have exclusive use of the house, 35 of our guests plus us are staying overnight with breakfast the next day, we have welcome drinks canapes, champagne toast, wines for meal, buffet for 100, 3 course meal for 75 and a 2500 bar tab and 75 chair covers in two locations. So all in our we didnt do two bad.

Hope this helps

Martyne xx

I always tell people to haggle however i didnt but then the hire of the venue was pretty good. £2100 <<< this includes exclusive hire of the whole hotel and terrace for the wedding/sit down/reception and 5 amazingly decorated rooms and 2 cottages that they also hire out for the night until 11 the next morning. Oh and breakfast for everyone staying in the rooms & cottages. Good Ey???

Katie

X

Yes yes yes! Tell them your budget, tell them what you want and dont want.

My friend just booked a venue that should have been a minimun spend of £6700, for £5500!

x

The haggle question will depend on the day of the week the wedding is on and how popular the venue is. Popular venues tend to be less pliable as in their view, there is always someone else willing to pay their rates. It is though worth seeing wht extras you can get....as suggested above, barter for wedding bridal suite thrown in and other elements. Many venues will deal with you on these even if the core cost of the wedding reception room(s) aren't discounted.

Peter