🚨 Wedding Venues STOP Sabotaging Your Venue Booking Experience‼️
Wedding venues, we all know the UK wedding market is fiercely competitive and right now, but many venues are unintentionally making a massive mistake.
As someone who sold 148 weddings in my final year managing a venue (and being in-house wedding celebrant), I can tell you with absolute certainty: one small line in your dated training manual is quietly killing your brand, your atmosphere, and the booking experience couples just paid for.
🌍 The Whole Wedding Landscape Has Shifted
Couples today curate experiences, not logistics.
They want personality.
They want authenticity.
They want emotion.
The rigid, one size fits approach no longer works.
Telling couples to “now book the registrar” as soon as they’ve booked your venue?
It belongs to another era and venues who understand this shift and adapt are the ones who secure high value bookings and create unforgettable ceremonies.
🛑 Venue Teams: Let’s Talk About That Line in Your Dated Training Manual
You know it well:
“Congratulations on booking with us, now go and book the registrar to attend.”
From a behavioural perspective, this single sentence is catastrophic. Even worse if you’re offering to contact them for ceremony availability!
It’s like watching a balloon float joyfully toward the ceiling… and then someone pops it with a biro. 🎈
Why? Because:
The Energy Drop Is Immediate. Couples go from excited and relaxed to visibly tense. Your carefully crafted “you’re in safe hands with us” atmosphere is replaced by a sudden anxiety of the officious process and the worry of a rubbish ceremony time.
The Conveyor Belt Effect. Registrars aren’t villains (well, mostly 🫣) they’re victims of an overstretched government system. But their time pressure and availability becomes your vibe problem.
Registrars are not there to bring the magic to your couples day, only there because their council rota says so. Suddenly everything feels rushed, officious, transactional, and “next please”, as the couple become one of many weddings taking place that day on the confetti conveyor belt.
🧡 The Intimacy and Energy Disconnect on the Wedding Day is Palpable
I’ve witness this disconnect first hand!
You’ve witnessed this disconnect first hand!
Couples spend months choosing trusted suppliers they adore, forming a relationships with your venue team, trialling hair and make up, mini photo shoot to get to know the photographer, meeting the baker to taste the cakes …and then, at the most emotional moment of their lives, two complete strangers step up and run the show, looking at the matching suits and asking you to point out “which one is the groom?”.
If you told your couples they must invite two unknown civil servants to stand beside them while they express their deepest feelings in front of their closest family and friends, they’d laugh you out of the room.
Yet somehow… we’ve normalised it. 🤷♀️
💬 This is exactly why I became a celebrant.
I couldn’t keep watching couples go from excited and full of hope… to suddenly stressed, rushed, and handed over to a process that felt nothing like the wedding they’d imagined, nor the experience they’d had thus far.
My whole purpose now is to close that gap the gap between the couples expectation of a magical dream wedding ceremony, and the reality of a government-administered formality conducted by strangers.
I want to bring the heart back into it. 🧡
The joy.
The love story.
The bit that actually feels human.
The reason you do what you do.
✨ The £68.50 Fix (New Industry Standard - aka ‘the way it should be!’ )
Here’s what you should be offering instead, or at the very least as an alternative, the modern, stress-free approach:
✅ Step 1: The Legal Bit (£68.50)
A statutory 2+2 legal registration at the register office.
Three minutes.
Two witnesses.
No photos.
One line and names repeated.
Done! ✅
(It’s intentionally dull. Its job is only legal registration - like doing a birth certificate, not emotional.)
⭐ Step 2: The Real Ceremony (The Celebration)
At your venue.
Led by a celebrant. 🙋♀️
Full of storytelling, laughter, ugly happy tears, personality, pets and soul.
This is the ceremony and dream experience couples thought they were booking when they fell in love with the dream.
This is how you protect your atmosphere, your brand, and your booking experience. ✅
📈 Why Venues Should Care (The Business Case)
Partnering with a celebrant isn’t a “nice idea”, it’s a strategic advantage.
Venues who adopt the two-step model:
✔ Remove registrar availability as a barrier
✔ Boost conversions at showcases
✔ Keep the consistency from show round to confetti
✔ Deliver the full wedding day with no energy drop or disconnect
✔Provide the full immersive experience that modern couples are actively seeking from a venue
It’s not about replacing registrars.
It’s about reframing their role so the law happens in their office and the real magic happens exactly where it should: in your venue.
🤝 Yorkshire & Lancashire Venues - This Is Your Opportunity
If your competitors are still saying “Now book the registrar,” congratulations, you’ve just found your unfair advantage. 👏
And if you’re reading this, consider yourself lucky, you’ve just stumbled on another unfair advantage - Me! 🧡
I’m currently booking my December–March wedding venue showcases. Invite me to yours showcase, and I’ll make sure your venue steals the show.
I’m always happy to chat to your Wedding and Events Team and explain how to position wedding celebrancy with your couples and why it’s the value added partnership that your venue is missing!
Let’s chat!
Katie x