By Alexis Vardakas
Editor’s Note: I am so very excited to have former YCS team member guest writing for the YCS Bride Guide! I am thrilled for Alexis who is going to be a 2018 bride like myself and am so happy that she is willing to share her point of view on the wedding planning process and share some tips and tricks with the YCS Family! Stay Chic! XOXO Erika
Hello everyone! It is good to be back writing for Your Chic is Showing; I have missed you all. Erika and I both have the joy of planning our weddings for next year and with that, she asked me to contribute again. I hope some of my tips help you with the craziness that is wedding planning. For this blog post, I wanted to focus on picking the right venue.
As soon as I got engaged, the first item I wanted to tick off my list was getting my date and venue squared away. Due to family, work and jobs, we knew we had a very short list of dates that we could use. Also, if you have not seen already, venues book up quickly and far in advance. Besides the price (obviously), what you need to remember when picking your venue is to consider what is important to you or it can get far too overwhelming.
Some questions to ask yourself when you visit various venues include:
- Is it the style we want?
- Is the the date we want available?
- Are accommodations included or nearby? Does that matter?
- What are the food and alcohol selections/options?
- Where is the venue located?
Before getting started, I knew the style I wanted and the price point for my venue. Therefore, many of the venue choices seemed like they could be “the one” until I made a list of what was important to me. I did know that having the date I wanted was important. Another important factor for us was having accommodations onsite because we have many people from out of the country who will be coming to our wedding. I also really appreciated when a venue had an onsite area to get ready since I am doing both the ceremony and reception at the same venue.
I made my list of all the necessary points into a pretty excel spreadsheet and compared them to each of the venues we considered. After that, there was one venue that had more positives than any other venue we had looked at and it was clear that we needed to move forward with that one. Keep in mind that the venue that you finally choose may not even be on your radar or vice versa. In the beginning of our process the venue we ended up choosing did not seem like the front runner until we laid everything out. I knew there would not be a “perfect” venue because a perfect venue does not exist; but, I knew this checked most of our boxes and we could make it ours.
The number one important point to remember when wedding planning is to make your wedding a reflection of you and your partner and everything else will fall in place! I wish you all luck in your search.
All the best,
Alexis