Availability following COVID
If you follow us on Insta (and if you don’t, you need to get onto that!) and even if you don’t, I’m sure you can imagine how busy we’ve been over the past few months helping our couples who booked weddings with us this year. We had a whole season of big Saturday, midi mid week and elopement weddings. All of them had to be postponed as the Govt shut down all weddings of all sizes with no deadline for when they’d be allowed again.
Imagine the anxiety for couples who’d booked their weddings a couple of years ago – finally the year of the wedding had arrived and instead of being full of excitement and nearly bursting with enthusiasm, they were looking at no wedding at all. Not get married, not sharing this day with loved ones. Horrible. And to add to it, a lot of them felt bad for being upset about missing their wedding. When the entire world was looking at death rates in the 10’s of 1,000’s they felt guilty they were worrying about missing their wedding. But I def understood how they felt, we felt bereft too at seeing all our weddings disappear in one fell swoop.
We worked hard to make sure all our couples were kept informed about what was going on – even when we didn’t have any news or answers! So sometimes I wrote emails that told them there was nothing to say, weddings were still banned and we still didn’t know what that might mean for this year’s weddings. Gradually it became clear that the big weddings could not go ahead so then we pivoted to postpone all our weddings to next year. I heard some couples who booked with other venues and couldn’t get an alternative summer date, couldn’t get a Saturday. Some were being offered a mid-week date in a completely different season – for the same price! There were some horror stories out there – you only need to look at Rock My Weddings Corona virus community pages to see some of the awful things that were going on.
Postponements completed
I’m proud we got new dates for all our couples. NGL, it wasn’t easy but with some juggling around and a hefty dose of can-do on the part of everyone, we got everyone re-booked. On the same day of the week they’d already booked and (for those who wanted it) in the same season of the year. New dates had to be checked with suppliers, important guests – a ton of calendar checking but eventually. All.Done. Everyone snuggly booked in to a new date.
Whilst we were getting all that straight, we didn’t take any new bookings for next year because we wanted to look after our 2020 couples first. Now that’s done we can start looking at new bookings for next year.
Availability for 2021
Well, to be honest there’s very little left. We do 3 types of weddings (but you knew that right?) you’ve got the summer Saturdays (up to 120 guests), the MMW on Wednesdays only (up to 20 guests) – both those types of weddings are May to September. And the elopements for up to 8 guests.
Let’s run through each of them:
summer Saturday 2021 availability
These are like hen’s teeth. As of writing this post we’ve got 2 Saturdays in May and that’s it. Those dates are 8th and 15th. All other Saturdays for 2021 are now fully booked.
MMW 2021 availability
We’ve got 1 definite date left which is Wednesday 25th August 2021.
We’ve got 2 potential dates left but they both depend on whether 2 elopement weddings which are currently booked actually take place in the next few weeks. The first date is Wednesday 5th May 2021 and we won’t know whether we can release that date until the end of August.
The second potential date is Wednesday 14th July 2021 and we won’t know about that date until probably September. One of our couples had a date booked next month, they have postponed until October but in case October can’t happen, they’ve also got a date reserved with us for next July. This COVID business is for sure giving us all a few headaches with the uncertainty.
So that’s one definite date (11th August 2021) and 2 potential dates 5th May and 14th July 2021 for MMW.
elopement availability this year and 2021
We’ve got some elopement dates left for November and December this year. We’ve got some really exciting news coming soon about the elopements which I can’t wait to share! It’s a new addition to our elopement offerings but I can’t say more about it right now, we’re still polishing things up to make it as fab as we can.
Heading into 2021 we’re fully booked for April, May, June, July, August, September and October 2021. Yep, that’s right, no dates available from the beginning of April to the end of October 2021. We’ve got dates available in February and March 2021 and I’ve got some news on our winter elopements coming up soon which is super exciting and you’ll read about it here first.
With the big news we’ve got coming on the elopements is – there could be some more dates available. Yay! That’s the trouble when you deal in dates, they ain’t making any more of ’em. So we’ve had to work hard to figure out how to bring more dates in while still keeping to our original mission of exclusive use.
News coming about 2023
I’ve also got some fairly massive news coming up about 2023 which might surprise some people. Yep there’s a lot going on here at Ever After HQ and we’ve got some changes coming – some big, some small. So pop back in and check for updates. I usually give you a heads up on Insta when there’s big news posted over here on the blog so you can make sure you get it hot off the press.
Any questions? Ping me an email at [email protected], I’d love to hear from you, give me some wedding love in my inbox!
