How To Choose A Wedding Venue – When You Can’t See It In Person!
A great article from Here Comes the Guide featuring us!
It’s like meeting your venue on a dating app.
While a global pandemic keeps us all sheltered at home, the power of technology helps us feel connected. And it makes it possible to continue wedding planning from the comfort of our couch!
Plus, if there’s one silver lining to being quarantined, it’s that we’re forced to get creative. And who better to get creative than the wedding industry?
Now more than ever, wedding venues are offering one-on-one virtual site tours via FaceTime, Skype, or Duo. You can virtually “walk” through the event spaces with the venue’s on-site coordinator, talk through what your wedding could look like at their location, ask questions, and address concerns as they come up in real time.
Whether you’re wedding planning during the COVID-19 pandemic or simply wanting to view venues in a far-flung location, what better way to find your ideal event space from home than with a live virtual site tour?
Here’s how to choose a wedding venue—when you can’t see it in person!
1. Lay out your non-negotiables
Before booking a site tour of any kind, it’s important to decide on your must-haves. For example: How many guests will the venue need to accommodate? Do they have an outdoor space for your ceremony? Will they allow you to BYO alcohol? What’s their curfew?
We recommend having a general idea of at least your budget, guest count, desired geographic location and wedding date range before beginning your venue search. Getting your highest priorities in order first will make the process of finding your ideal venue MUCH more simplified and streamlined.
2. Nail down your budget
If you still need to figure out your finances, we recommend starting with these 6 Simple Steps To Setting A Wedding Budget. We know you’d rather skip this step and go straight to the site tours, but having a budget in mind before starting your venue search is key! You don’t want to fall in love with a place that will bust your bank account entirely, so sit down with your fiancé and crunch those numbers.
Since your venue has the potential to take a healthy bite out of your overall wedding budget, you’ll want to not only have a dollar amount in mind for how much you’re able to spend, but also be sure to factor in some extra cushion for unanticipated costs—like service fees, parking fees, additional rentals, etc.
3. Start your initial research on Here Comes The Guide
If you weren’t already aware, we’ve got thousands of wedding venues listed on our website! We’re super Type-A, too, which means that we’ve organized them in every way imaginable—from wedding venues by style (barns, and ballrooms, and beaches – oh my!), to wedding venues by state, and even things like all-inclusive venues and small wedding spaces for guest lists…
We Specialize in All-Inclusive
At first, we thought all-inclusive meant just having all the infrastructure ready to go for the couple, so what looks like such a simply beautiful, largely outdoor wedding could be as clean and simple as the lines of the tent. There should be no hassles about getting in all the infrastructure and having it ready for your wedding. We did not want to witness a rental truck showing up at the last minute and a mom or bridesmaid, or the couple themselves, setting up chairs and tables–even mowing the yard–on the morning of the wedding. These were all things Jeanne witnessed repeatedly over the years. No wonder people were exhausted before their wedding even began…
