Suppliers - Booking near home or the venue?

The only problem with booking closer to your home is extra charges. I’m having to pay an extra £150 due to the distance of the events company I’m using. It would be the same for the cake maker and florist if I wasn’t using local ones. Ask your venue for recommended suppliers.

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I thought that might be the case if they had to travel which is making me think maybe it'll be easier to get the majority booked closer to the venue especially as I'm getting ready there as well

The venue is having an open day in September so i'll probably see what suppliers are there as they'll be local to the venue, they have already recommended a decorator company to us as well so will probably get a quote from them. Just worried it might be a pain travelling back and forth for any finalization appointments or trails!

Thanks!

From a photography point of view 1 hour is not much, but it would be on my outer limits of how far I would travel. But I am a rarity as some are willing to travel for 3+ hours.

Consider this, if a photographer is willing to travel for 3 hours for your wedding then quite possibly they did it yesterday for another wedding, which they left at 10pm and get home for 1am. They now have to download all the shots, then back that up on another medium, recharge all the battery's, maybe grab a bite to eat, they are not getting to bed until 2.30 and they then have to get up in 3-4 hours to go and shoot your wedding.

So no problem as yours could be the first of the weekend so you get them fresh. But there was one horror story on this forum and it turned out that the photographer got home and left the camera downloading to a laptop and went bed - got up the next day and deleted yesterdays images but it wasn't until they got back from that wedding that they realised yesterdays wedding download had failed. A combination of travelling late and trying to book as many weddings in as possible.

Another thing is I try to avoid motorways as much as possible its a nightmare of mine being stuck on a motorway.

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Thanks for your input, good to hear it from a suppliers point of view! I think I will definitely be trying to keep everyone's travel to a minimum to avoid as many unforeseen issues as possible!

You shouldn't actually need to have many meetings with suppliers - it's always a good idea to meet in person once (and obviously, hair or makeup trials would have to be done in person) but most things can be sorted by phone or email. So I wouldn't worry too much about having suppliers who live near your venue.

If you can find anyone who lives between your home & venue, that would be the best solutions of course! But an hour isn't really that far. We booked a photographer who lived 45 minutes from our hometown and about the same from the venue, and we just combined our trip to see him with something else on the same day.

I've seen a few people say there are delays with registrars! I only put mine in on 12th July so think I've got a while yet! Xx

My venue is about 1.5 hours away from me so I have tried to find suppliers local to the venue, otherwise you're looking at travel costs for them on top. I chose a lot of suppliers that my venue recommended too. If you have your heart set on someone local to you that is happy to travel though, do what feels best. Most suppliers are happy to do video or phone meetings rather than in person anyway, and sometimes it's nice to have an excuse to go and visit your venue again when meeting suppliers!

View quoted message Yes I'm thinking supplier's nearer the venue sounds like the best idea. The only one local I pretty much want to use is for the cake, which is probably the worst thing to travel unfortunately! I'm hoping when I go to the wedding fayre at our venue it'll give us a few suppliers to try!

View quoted message I'm sure it will, have fun and enjoy - this is an exciting time!

Hi, 1 hr isn't much. I travel all over the UK for weddings. I'm a photographer, not sure about other suppliers,

Yeh a supplier half way between you and the venue sounds like a great idea