How to Ensure Your Dream Wedding Venue Doesn’t Become a Nightmare
No matter how intimate the photograph of a bride and groom taken on their wedding day, one other ‘character’ is always present. Sometimes consigned to the background, sometimes prominently in the foreground, this particular wedding feature will shape the character and memories of your wedding for evermore. It’s your wedding venue – the grand stage on which your romantic wedding scene is acted out.
Booking the venue is, for many couples, the point at which their wedding dreams turn into reality. Granted, the moment when the prospective partner gets down on one knee and pops the question is when the magic begins, but writing out a cheque for a 10% or 20% deposit means fixing a date, calculating guest numbers and remembering that Aunt Edna and Cousin Dan need to be kept well apart on the seating plan.
Shelling out hard-earned cash has a way of focusing the mind, which is why venue booking prompts many brides and grooms to buy wedding insurance. Venues can cost anything from £50 for the village hall right up to £20,000 for a romantic castle or a five-star hotel. In most cases a deposit will have to be paid months in advance. Commercial venues are also increasingly likely to ask whether the wedding is covered by public liability insurance, which is why so many couples turn to experts like Dave Simms, wedding insurance manager at Ecclesiastical.
Over the last ten years, Dave has insured thousands of weddings across the UK so has seen virtually every kind of venue on offer: churches, cathedrals, hotels, castles, stately homes – even ships and football grounds!
“Public liability insurance is something that lots of venues are very hot on now,” explains Dave. “They want to know they’re protected against damage and injuries so will ask for up to £2 million-worth of cover, which is what our wedding policy and some others provide. In some cases it’s definitely no insurance, no booking.”
Booking the venue is an important step forward in the planning of your wedding, but from that moment, you and your venue are pretty much bound together, for better or worse – and, as Dave knows only too well, things can get a lot worse, which is where wedding insurance comes in.
Going out of business
Commercial wedding venues like hotels and restaurants are just as susceptible to financial problems as any other kind of business. In the year between a couple paying their deposit and their wedding date, it’s not uncommon for a venue to go out of business – particularly in a recession – often taking the deposit with them. Not only can this leave you hundreds or thousands of pounds out of pocket, you’ve nowhere to hold your reception and precious little time or money to find a replacement.
Fab venue, shame we couldn’t get into it
In 2007, the town of Gloucester suffered some of the heaviest flooding in its history. Luckily the town’s many historic wedding venues remained high and dry, but there was one other slight problem: flooded roads meant wedding parties couldn’t actually reach their venues, creating chaos all round. Venues have been put out of action in many different ways – fires, structural failures, outbreaks of food poisoning – all of which lead to unexpected costs for the bride and groom and trigger the dilemma of whether to postpone or try to find another venue only three weeks ahead of the big day.
With this ring, I thee scratch
Beautiful and expensive venues contain lots of beautiful and expensive things: paintings, vases, mirrors, handmade furniture, polished wooden floors. All too often, enthusiastic members of the wedding party forget that they’re not allowed to venture into the private wing of the house or the newly refurbished Mayfair Suite and knock over a rare Chinese vase. Next thing you know it’s some very angry hotel staff and a bill for £3,000. “Cigar burns, broken furniture and scratched dance floors are fairly common,” remarks Dave, “but we’ve also recently had a couple who got a very big bill when their wedding guests damaged a hot spa.”
Protecting yourself makes good financial sense
With so much money at stake and so many arrangements to make, opting for wedding insurance is, for many people, a bit of a no-brainer when it comes to venues. Starting at just £30 for Ecclesiastical’s cover, experts like Dave Simms and his team can give you the money and help necessary to have a Plan B if your venue lets you down.
Your wedding venue is going to be an integral part of your big day and your memories of it for the rest of your life. The key is that they’re happy memories of a beautiful day spent in a beautiful place. Sound planning and a good insurance policy behind you will make sure that’s the case.
Dave Simms is the wedding insurance manager at Ecclesiastical Insurance Group.
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