Hello,
I’d love some advice from an unbiased “guest” point of view. We are getting married in October and found a great venue. It’s the perfect size, budget, “look”, location, etc. (It’s a hall where pretty much all of the set up type work would be done by us/outside vendors, for clarification in the rest of my post).
In my ideal world, we would be able to get into the space earlier in the day to decorate and set up. Then our ceremony would be late afternoon/early evening with a full dinner-type reception starting right after in the same space. However, community members have first dibs on the space in the morning/afternoon and apparently this venue can only guarantee us that we will be able to use the space from 4:30onwards. They will be able to tell us in July if we can use the space earlier in the day. Obviously, if this happens, my ideal of a late afternoon/early evening ceremony with reception right afterwards won’t work.
We will know in July either way and there will be about 3 months to make alternative plans. Both of us and our families have different opinions and things to consider, but I’d like to know the guests’ point of view. So, if you were a guest, which option would you prefer?
Have the ceremony in the late afternoon but at a different location. I don’t have a specific location in mind yet, but assume the ceremony location would be about 10-25 minutes away from the reception location. The reception would also continue as planned as a full dinner (time stays roughly the same, but location changes).
Have the ceremony and reception in the same location but start the ceremony later in the evening, like 7 or 8, and have an appetizer and dessert type reception. Assume the time/invitations would make it clear that a full dinner will not be provided so that no one will show up starving, and that we will have plenty of appies available (location stays the same, but the time/type of reception changes).
I guess a third option would be to find another venue, but since this one meets all of our other criteria, I’d rather not do that.
Now, we might find out in July that we can have our venue earlier in the day as hoped and everything will work out as planned in my ideal world. But my brain likes to plan and if it can’t plan it starts to stress, so I’d love to have an idea of the preferred alternative just in case….to ease my brain.
Thanks for your opinions!