Wedding Hire: Help Picking Your Venue

Deciding on a wedding venue is a huge choice for a couple. Picking the right place is the sum of a lot of decisions affecting all kinds of aspects of the big day. As wedding hire experts, we deliver to many wedding venues across the region and we thought we would offer our own pointers based on what we’ve seen.

How long do you have your venue for?

Like any other business, a venue will want to maximise the amount of time their space is in use. This means that they can be quite strict about how long before and after your wedding the space will be available – which can impact heavily on how you plan your day.

If your venue is insistent on you only having the space for a short time, you will need to think about how this time constraint affects any vendors you may be ordering things from. For example, our narrowest time slots are morning (8am to 1pm) and afternoon (12pm to 6pm) which attract a surcharge and are subject to availability. These kinds of delivery charges are unavoidable in the wedding hire industry and can affect a budget quite severely. Worse than that, any unforeseen issues with delivery such as traffic accidents causing jams can make a tight time slot completely unachievable.

Our recommendation is wherever possible to arrange with a venue to take delivery the day before an event. This will allow ample time to set up your wedding hire properly at the venue, and cover any problems should they occur. There's no need to worry about waiting in for a delivery driver either, as we have made it possible for customers to track orders being delivered.

How much space does your venue have?

The size of your event space is a key factor when looking at your wedding venue. It’s pretty obvious to check the event space for how many guests you can fit in, but what might not be so quick to spot is ancillary space that might be needed.

If you are utilising outside vendors for your wedding, then it’s almost certain that storage space might be needed. For example, if you have to remove chairs and tables between portions of an event then you will need somewhere to put them out of the way. An outside caterer might need extra space for their equipment, or to serve food.

All of our banqueting chairs are stackable to ensure that as little space is needed as possible to store them, while our banqueting tables have folding legs to help them take up little space. We’re happy to advise on how much space these would take up if you’re working out plans for your day.

What is the access to the venue like?

One factor that potentially gets overlooked for venues is the access. Access is how everyone involved in your big day will be able to get to the event space; both guests and any outside vendors you might have chosen.

Things to think about include parking and road access as well as access into the space itself. For example, if many of your guests have a long distance to travel then car parking could be a must; or if you have to accommodate disabled guests then things like stairs and doorways need to be looked at.

For outside vendors it’s important that there is a decent goods entrance. For some venues it’s simply a case of opening the goods door and rolling through to the space but for others lifts and suchlike might be important. If you have a lot of outside equipment coming in it’s important to make sure that your vendors can get it to where you need it; the last thing you want to do on your big day is to be moving around heavy boxes of crockery.