Availability of venue

Congrats on your engagement! It might be dependent on location and venue, but I don't think it's accurate. I just took a quick scan through all the venues near where I will be getting married, and they are all listed as fully open from today all the way through 2022 so I don't think most venues update the availabilities on this site. When I spoke with potential venues back in December 2020 for a date in 2022, most of them were already very booked due to postponements, some were even booked every single day of the week (including Tuesdays and Wednesdays) for 2021. My wedding date was the last Saturday evening available at my venue for March 2022 (and I booked in December 2020), so I definitely recommend starting to reach out to venues now. A lot of them may be willing to hold the date for you for a week or so while you're making a decision/before security deposit as long as you are genuinely interested in them.

I would contact the venue directly to find out availabilty, but know it changes all the time. If the availability isn't linked to their website, it is probably out of date. Is there a particular date you are looking for? I would recommend moving quickly once you have a venue and date picked because they fill up SO fast. When I decided on my venue, my original date I wanted was open, by the next weekend it had been booked. We had to change our date bc we liked the venue.

Also, congratulations on your engagement!

View Quoted Comment

Thank you! To be honest I'm really not sure about a date, it's kind of the part that's overwhelming me the most right now, since everyone is telling me I have to book a venue like yesterday. Especially because like most I want something in the Spring. Fiance and I are currently trying to decide on whether or not we should have a long engagement instead and try for 2023.

View Quoted Comment

Thanks! And yeah I thought it seemed super unrealistic, thank you for confirming & sharing what your experience has been. It's a bit crazy because I live in Brooklyn NY but want to have our wedding on Long Island where most of our family is, so to look at venues I'm going to have to be traveling back and forth a lot.

View Quoted Comment It is totally up to you! I would wait until you know what you want to start looking, because you will definitely feel pressured to make a decision once you find something. Our engagement will be about a year total, just to give me time to plan everything without going crazy. We don't want to wait any longer so that we can move forward with our lives and buy a house, have kids, etc. If you aren't in a rush, a longer engagement is perfectly fine!

View Quoted Comment

We're actually getting married in Long Island as well We live in MA so definitely agreed on the complexity traveling adds. Most of the venues we spoke to actually offered virtual tours where the banquet manager would walk you through via Facetime or Zoom which was actually incredibly helpful. It's one thing for professionally and perfectly staged photos of a venue to look beautiful, but another for venues to still look stunning through an iPhone videochat. Maybe to reduce travelling, you can narrow down to 1-3 venues from virtual tours and then set up in person visits for one weekend?

We actually signed our venue before visiting in person based off of reviews here amongst other websites and Google reviews, but finally did have the chance to visit last month and loved it even more.

View Quoted Comment

Wow, weird coincidence! That's awesome. And I forgot about virtual tours, that would be super helpful for us actually. Where on LI are you getting married?

View Quoted Comment

Good thought. It's hard because I'd obvs want to do sooner rather than later, as I'm in my late 20s and my fiancé is in his early 30s. But we're also not in super rush (i.e. we don't know if/when we're gonna have kids) so it wouldn't be the worse thing to wait. Maybe we'll start looking now and see how possible it's looking to get something for 2022 and figure out from there