Before you can book your Caterer, DJ, Florist, etc, you have to have a confirmed wedding date set. You cannot confirm your wedding date until you have booked a wedding location. So the first service you should book for your wedding is your Wedding Location. The main items to consider in selecting your wedding ceremony and reception site (or sites) are any date restrictions, your wedding style and size, site availability, site attributes and cost.

Date Restrictions. Some couples are dead-set on a specific wedding date while other couples have several dates that are possible. If your selected date is an absolute, this will help you to quickly narrow down your group of semi-finalist venues since some of them will already be booked on your selected date.

Wedding Style and Size. Your wedding style will help in narrowing the list of potential sites. Some sites have solely indoor or outdoor facilities, may be formal or casual, at the beach or on a ranch. Check out our Location Table for the Central Coast County in which you want to marry to see a quick summary of Site Attributes of the major Venues in that county. Place the sites that best match your wedding style onto your finalists list. The smaller your number of guests, the more options you will have. Sites that cannot handle the size of your party may be taken off of your finalist list.

Availability, Attributes and Cost. Armed with your semi-finalist list of potential Wedding Venues, conduct some focused research. Visit each of their websites to learn more about their services and to see photos of the site. A quick and easy way to link to the Websites of your Venue finalists is to click on the Local Wedding Vendors Tab, select your County of interest (or multiple Counties), then click on the Locations Tab on the left. This will give you a listing of local Venues with links to each of their websites!

Then call or email your finalists. Do they have your preferred date available? If so, does the site have all of the attributes you want? See our Reception Site Worksheet (Planning Tools Tab  >> Worksheet Tab >> Reception Site Worksheet) for a list of potential questions to ask. Make copies of this worksheet for each of the venues you call and record the answers so that you can evaluate your data later.

What is the cost for your size of reception? Because each site has different attributes and different pricing structures, it can seem difficult to compare apples to apples. Some sites include tables and chairs while you would have to rent them at other sites. Some sites include food, plates, and flatware while you would have to hire a caterer at other sites. Some sites are naturally gorgeous so your decoration cost (and labor) will be minimal.

So the best way to evaluate price ‘apples to apples’ is to add up all of the costs associated with having your ceremony or reception at a given site and then divide the total cost by the total number of guests. This will give you the overall cost per person. Although cost is a consideration, your final selection will be based on many factors – including your gut feeling, which should never be disregarded!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Ceremony, How-To Articles, Locations / Venues, Planning Tools, Reception, Wedding Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.