Where to start

Congratulations on the engagement. I'm sorry about your family not showing much interests, my family is the same as my wedding is planned for Sept 2025.

What I learned from planning, we planned our wedding for 3.5 years away when we got engaged to give ourselves time with spending. I started looking at venues probably 2 months after the engagement I knew I wanted outdoors, so I went venue hunting. We picked our venue and we have a payment plan set up - it made it much more doable for us to spread the cost like this.

I hope this helps at all. xx

Congratulations on your engagement!

For venues, I set up my profile here on Hitched, and I set it up using a specific wedding email address to help me keep things organised (I cannot recommend this enough!)

I then searched through the hundreds of venues in my area that are listed on here, and sent off generic enquiry emails to any that I liked the look of. At first I was worried about wasting people’s time if it turned out their venue wasn’t suitable, but I quickly learned that most respond with a brochure of some kind which allowed me to rule things in or out depending on what it said.

From there, my FH and I happened to have a week off work together coming up, so we set up 4 venue viewings for that week (it definitely helps to be available for viewings during the week, as often at the weekends they’re busy hosting other weddings). We chose to view our dream-but-probably-too-expensive venue, a budget venue, and 2 mid-range nice-looking hotels.

Knowing we had 4 made us feel confident that we didn’t have to make a decision immediately. It was also clear that they’re used to people shopping around, so we didn’t feel like we were wasting anyone’s time.

In the end, the one we fell head over heels for was actually the budget venue - it also happened to be the first one we saw! But knowing we had other viewings booked in stopped us from just booking it immediately, so we were sensible and went away and thought about it before confirming.

One thing I will say is don’t be too firm on decisions like colours before choosing your venue. We were absolutely certain we wanted red, but our venue is bright blue and our wedding planner was very honest and said they can make pretty much any colour work except for red!

The venue really needs to be a you and FH decision. If you involve family then you get loads of different opinions, some which may be difficult to push back against, maybe family not fully understanding your budget or tastes or requirements. I'd keep them out of it tbh. Decide what you want and book, then share with family.

Are you wanting to get married in the same place as you have your reception, or is the actual marriage going to be in a registry office or place of worship? If you just need a reception venue, then I'd look at local pubs or restaurants. We had a church wedding, and booked our reception at a lovely country pub which just charged us the cost of the food and drink - ended up being less than half the price of the cheapest 'wedding venue' package in our area!

You do need to think about your guest list before looking at wedding venues - there's no point finding the perfect venue with a max capacity of 30 if your minimum guest list is 40! Once you know roughly the venue size you need, then start googling. Local social media community groups are often good sources of advice for venues too, so you could try posting on a local community page for suggestions. Also, when you are researching florists and photographers, make a note of the venues they have worked at - you might gain inspiration from their pictures.

Congratulations on your engagement! We really enjoyed picking our venue and started out by thinking about the following to help us narrow down:
- How many people do we roughly think we will invite
- Exclusive / non-exclusive use- Type of venue eg hotel, barn, outdoor woodland, castle/stately home type - Style of venue eg something modern or something more traditional- Did we want everything in 1 place or were we happy to have eg the ceremony in 1 venue and travel somewhere for our wedding breakfast and reception - Was it important for the venue to have accommodation and if so, to accommodate everyone or just the wedding party- Extra things that were important to us eg we considered a band and fireworks so we wanted to check venues could cater for that
We then looked at the venues on Hitched and it was great to help us find some that we hadn’t even heard of before.
I also set up a specific wedding email address and found that everyone I emailed was quite responsive with brochures / links to their wedding website. I outlined in my email the rough dates we were looking at, number of guests we expected to help with budgeting, asked when their next open days were and whether they offered provisional hold for dates if we wanted to proceed.
We narrowed it down to 3 venues and went to see them all on the same day so we could directly compare - if you can try to see them all close together, I think it’s helpful. There’s also loads of helpful lists of things to ask venues when you go to visit - Hitched has a few as well.
Really hope you enjoy choosing!

View quoted message This is how I want to do mine. We got engaged However we’re not having an engagement party it’s just another cost we’re looking for May 7th 2025 as this will be our 15th anniversary but with costs not sure it’s doable. Places/venues are so expensive 😢

View quoted message We're not doing an engagement party, like you say its another cost. Aww that will be lovely to do on your 15th anniversary. It is expensive but maybe look at payment plans with your suppliers? It makes the payment more doable then a lump sum. Most suppliers, especially if you are planning to do it just over 2 years, they'll set up a payment plan. My photographer said they want the last payment 2 months prior but I asked if I çan send random payments to clear it off and they agreed xx

View quoted message We have 42 people to the day and have discussed to get married as late as possible so we don’t have the sit down meal just go into photographs and evening time. And we’re looking at a bbq or hog roast as hoping it will bring cost down more