Choosing Your Date: Advice from a Wedding Coordinator Part 2
Let’s move a little further from the big picture that we covered in the first part of this series into the nitty gritty details of choosing your wedding date. Whether you’re throwing a wedding with a guest list in the hundreds or if you only want to invite a few friends and family, choosing a wedding date while considering your guests, venue, and vendors takes some consideration. Here’s a wedding coordinator’s advice on finding the perfect date to make your wedding dream become a reality.
Image from T&J’s wedding by Cory Nelson Photography. Floral arrangement by Honeycomb&Co.
What to Consider
If you missed Part 1, you can go back and read it here. This is what you’ll find in each post:
Part 1
Planning Time
Season and color schemes
Part 2
Guests
Venue and Vendors
Guests
Who are the most important people on your invite list? We recommend reaching out to your closest family and friends early in your decision-making process to see if there are any dates that you shouldn’t include in your schedule. While you don’t need to cater to everyone’s schedule, it is your wedding after all, it can save you future headaches to ensure that the people you most want at your celebration will be able to attend.
As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, we typically recommend around a year of planning time after your engagement. While this time is needed for you to figure out all the details that go into your wedding, it also gives your guests ample time to make their own plans around your wedding.
Destination Weddings
If you are planning on having a destination wedding, you’ll need to be even more aware of the time it takes to plan a wedding. Make sure to inform your guests of the location and date around 6-10 months in advance. They will need time to figure out travel plans, organize family schedules, and take time off work, so you don’t want to leave your date decision-making too late in the planning process.
Also, if your destination wedding location is outside of the country, make sure the covid restrictions in that area allow for large gatherings like weddings, and make sure that everyone in your party is able to follow covid entry protocol.
Venue and Vendors
Venue
Your venue can play a big role in the date you choose for your wedding. If you have a special venue where you want to celebrate your wedding, you may need to be flexible with your wedding date. Especially with the wedding rescheduling that happened during covid, many venues have dates booked out significantly in advance. Reach out to your preferred venue and ask what dates they have available. You may need to consider off-season wedding dates or weekdays to snag a date within the next year, or consider pushing your planning process out a little to get a date you’re excited about at your venue.
If you want a special date in mind for your wedding day, you likely will have to consider multiple venues in order to find one that’s available on your date. Having a special date, like the date you met, an important astrological date, or just your favorite number can be a meaningful and memorable time to celebrate, but you’ll need to be flexible around vendors and your venue.
A wedding planner can help you find, research, and contact vendors to help you reserve the venue of your dreams or help you find a venue that’s available on your preferred date.
Vendors
Do you also have a favorite photographer that you just HAVE to have snapping pictures of your wedding day? Vendors like photographers, hair and makeup artists, and caterers are also busy during the wedding season and will likely need to be booked far in advance. If you have a specific vendor in mind whose services are important to your perfect wedding day, you can reach out to use their availability to determine your ideal wedding date.
The key to deciding on your wedding date depends on what is most important to you and planning around those details. If you’re willing to wait a little longer, getting your top choice date, vendors and venue is possible, but you may have to be prepared to make compromises or consider other exciting possibilities to plan your wedding in a year or less.
We hope these tips have helped you along the path to finding your wedding date. If you need a little help, we are here for you! We are wedding planning experts who have handled weddings at every time of year, even with cancellations and rescheduling throughout the covid pandemic. Get in touch for help deciding on your perfect date and bringing your dream wedding to life.