Exclusive use? And how far in advance to book venue?

Hello and welcome to hitched!

I personally think exclusive use is an unnecessary expense in most cases. In any circumstance you will be hiring your own private function rooms within the hotel so you have your own private space anyway and even if other functions or weddings are taking place the staff will have plenty of experience keeping everything seperate.

I booked our venue in Nov 2011 for September 2013, however you should note that some local registrars will not accept bookings to conduct the ceremony more then a year in advance so it is best to speak to your local registrary office as the booking of the venue and the registrar should be done in sync (assuming you having civil ceremony and not a church wedding)

Welcome to Hitched!

With regards to Exclusive Use, you can get that for much less than £20k. How many bedrooms are included for that? Does that include all your food and drink?

Whether it's important really depends on you and your OH. I was pretty set on exclusive use but I didn't pay that much. I had some quotes for well over £20k though so you'd be forgiven for thinking this is normal. It's not, though. It might be worth looking at venues that could feasibly only run one wedding a day as it's often the venues that have a number of function rooms that charge a lot for exclusive use as they have to cover the losses from the other rooms.

Most venues will take bookings a few years before, although mine wouldn't take them until just over a year before. If you book early then use it to your advantage. Try and get it in writing that they will hold this years prices for you. This can save you quite a lot by the time your date rolls round as venue hire fees and food and drink prices will probably go up year on year.

Just to add to Funky's good point about the registrar's - some will 'pencil' you in more than a year in advance so that you can book your venue. You then just phone up to confirm as soon as they allow it.

Wow thanks, that was quick! The £20k includes: Champagne Reception, Choice of 3 Canapés, Three Course Wedding Breakfast, Two Glasses of House Wine, Glass of Champagne to Toast, Sandwiches in the evening, Chair Covers and Organza White Table Linen, Coffee and Chocolates, Dedicated Events Team, Toast Master, 32 Bedrooms.

This price is based on 80 guests but we are looking more around 110! We both have large families. And for each extra guest it is £93.

I said in my original post that the main thing is to get a date in the school holidays, but if I'm being totally honest about it, the main reason I want to secure a date is to make sure we actually do get married! Marriage is important to both of us but my OH is a lot more laid back and if I leave it up to him to do the whole proposal thing it will probably never happen! It also means we can officially start saving if we have a deadline.

Thanks for all the advice x

Where abouts in the country are you looking?

i thought I wanted exclusive use, then when we started looking we found a lovely hotel which offered enough accommodation for all the guests to stay if they want and we get exclusive use of the function areas, but other people may be in the hotel.

Tbh that was enough for me!

Edit: forgot to say hello and welcome!

We booked in March 2012 for July 2014 and registrar let us book that far in advance, but it varies between counties! We went to a wedding fair last September at our venue and they had every Saturday until November 2014 booked already. Personally, I wouldn't bother with exclusive use - your guests can pay for their rooms themselves and if the venue is big enough you wouldn't even notice another wedding, 20k is a lot - our venue package is only £2,500 for 80 guests- but that is without any rooms.

I just wouldn't let the guests know the details of the package. Why tell them rooms are included? Just inform them the rooms should be booked through you or ask if the venue will allow payments for rooms to be deducted from your final bill.

I still think it's quite a lot though - even if you take into account the savings from recharging the rooms, you're still looking at £20k-ish for your numbers. Plus all the extra wedding costs.

I absolutely adored my venue and we paid approx £12k for 120 adults and nearly 20 kids (with some more in the evening).

Where in the UK are you?

Wow that must be some venue! ... From what you have said whats included in the price, I think the main bulk of your wedding price is in the rooms for the night..... Surely if its a hotel then couldn't your guests who want to stay pre book their room , therefore making it 'exclusive' .... This is what we have done, our hotel has 25 rooms to and have exclusive use it was thousands upon thousands, not much different from your quote, but.... With out exclusive use wedding would only be about 6k, so I got our guests who think about wanting to stay book a room meaning all hotel rooms booked..and fortunate for us this hotel doesn't take money from booking until the day before actual stay

Exactly this and one of my brides did just that! They would have to pay for a room somewhere anyway. From a photographers point of view I think exclusive use is important at times where your guests will be required to mingle with non guests. It's difficult sometimes to know who is a guest and who isn't, especially when everyone is dressed lovely!

Thanks again everyone,

We live in Yorkshire now but looking at getting married in the North East of England, preferably County Durham as that's where we met and first lived together. I'm also from the North East (Sunderland).

Having read all your advice, I think that we will be fine without exclusive use. So this should hopefully cut the cost considerably.

I have just looked on the Durham Council website though and a little confused about booking the registrar and about all the documents needed. It says we need to 'give notice' of marriage in the district where we currently live, which is different to the location of the wedding. But we can only do this up to a year in advance.

One of you mentioned that a registrar may 'pencil' us in, but for this would I contact Durham or our local registry office? Confused now and don't want us to book a venue then find out we can't get a registrar.

The council that would need to pencil you in would be the county where the wedding will be held. You give notice in the county where you live.

I live in Yorkshire and am also from the north east. I was looking at venues from Northumberland down to the midlands (ended up booking in Grantham) so I can try and dig out my venue notebook for some suggestions for you?

I'll talk you through how we booked as it's a similar situation...

I called Lincolnshire council and asked how far in advance we could book a registrar. They said a year but that they could pencil us in before that as long as we called a year before to book formally.

So then we went venue hunting. When we found the one we loved we provisionally booked for March 24th 2012 in December 2010.

Then I called Lincolnshire Registry office so they could pencil us in for our chosen time and date then once this was done I formally booked the venue.

Exactly a year before (at 9am, ha!) I confirmed with Lincolnshire then called Leeds to make an appointment to give notice.

After giving notice, Leeds sent all paperwork to Lioncolnshire then I dealt with them from then on with regards to ceremony specifics.

It is a little confusing.

When you book your registrar to conduct the ceremony you book with the local council where your venue is based.

Then no soon then a year before your wedding you give notice of marriage at your local registry office where you live.

Is your venue Lumley castle by any chance? X

Also, even if your chosen county won't book at all before a year, this does mean that no one else can book either. It wouldn't put me off booking a venue as I would just make sure I called as soon as the office opened on the day I could book.

The only think I would double check is that the registrars definitely work on that day (e.g. some don't on Easter Sunday etc).

Surely this shouldn't happen at any well-run event though? Even if you don't have exclusive use, every wedding I've been to has had a separate area for the drinks reception, non-guests won't be able to come into the wedding breakfast, and usually a separate bar/dancefloor for the evening. It would take someone very cheeky to actively wander into someone else's wedding party!

For our anniversary weekend we stayed in a hotel which turned out to have a wedding on that day. The only times we encountered weddingy people were at breakfast (normal, not wedding!) in the morning, and in the corridors on our way back to our room in the evening - neither of which I would imagine you'd want to photograph! We never saw the bride/groom. Unless we'd actively sought it out to gatecrash, there would have been no chance of us accidentally ending up in photos.

OP, I would check what the situation would be if you don't have exclusive use - where would non-wedding guests be allowed to be and how likely would you be to encounter them? We had our wedding in an Oxford college, so not quite the same situation, but they had summer school students staying over at the same time. They weren't allowed in any of the rooms/gardens we used, and had a separate canteen where they ate instead of the dining hall we were using, so the only time we encountered them was a few wandering around as we took photos, which I didn't mind at all. Similarly in a hotel I don't think I'd have minded having other guests staying in rooms there, as long as they had somewhere separate to eat/drink.

If guests have to go to the bar while the room is being turned over then there might be people in there that are staying at the venue/hotel. I have seen this many times.

I think you need to have some sort of exclusivity but it doesn't need to be too extreme.

We have a country pub with a marquee.

We don't have exclusive use to the country pub but its only open to public for 1 hour during our drinks reception then again in the evening.

We did ask for the outside tables and chairs to be 'reserved' for us so no-one would be out there so we could be the only people mingling outside (this is where we plan to have welcome drinks).

Obviously this doesn't stop the public leaving the pub though and then being walking between our guests to exit!

I do wish we had considered moving our ceremony to an hour later so that way we wouldn't have to worry about joe public, but I'd rather have an extra hour of the day so we will just deal with it.

Plus if its not good weather we will be straight into the marquee (which obviously is exclusive) anyway.

It's not Lumley Castle, but if our budget stretched we would be open to that possibility as it is a gorgeous place to get married. Phew! So much to think about, no wonder some couples have long engagements!

I see - there's always been a separate bar area at all the ones I've been to. I can see how it might be confusing, though I imagine the two groups wouldn't be mingling too much so there shouldn't be too much overlap? And it's only a relatively small part of the day.

In any case, while I can understand there might be a risk you take a few pics of the wrong people, as a bride I imagine the extra price for exclusive use would be so high that I'd rather risk a few wrong photos than fork out several grand more!

I'd not really worried about our TOG taking photos of people that aren't actually at our wedding who might be standing around in our crowd being nosey / waiting for someone else to exit the pub during our reception drinks.

I was more worried they might be offered some of our wine by the staff who thought they were part of our doo! Priorities! ?

I agree with this. It's no biggy for a few pics of the wrong people to be in there. If they show up for the group photos, that's a different matter ?

Personally, i wouldn't pay that amount for exclusive use of a venue - unless that money was pocket change. I certainly wouldn't tie myself to saving up for it & booking it several years in advance. You never know what's around the corner! For me, it was about the marriage & ceremony, not the venue. Well, the venue is important but not that important! (to us, anyway).

I think someone else posted that some venues have enough function rooms to do multiple weddings in a day & exclusive use would only really be worth paying for if that venue was the only venue for you & you desperately didn't want to share that venue with other brides on your special day. Whilst these venues do their best to keep the different functions/weddings separate, it is a possibility that you would come into contact with the other brides/grooms/guests. I think it's worth considering a venue that either doesn't have the room to do more than 1 wedding a day, or who has a strict 1 wedding per day policy. One of the venues we looked at wanted out custom, but had a strict 1 wedding policy & had a wedding booked in already.

Only the venues themselves can answer the question about how far in advance they will take bookings. Do, however, ensure that upon booking you have found out the local registrar's booking policy & get insurance in place. A local hotel recently went under & all weddings booked are cancelled. The bride's & groom's are having to contact whoever that need to to try & claim back their deposits/other monies paid.