I’m getting married in a few months, and like every groom and bride ever, while I’m excited for the big day, I won’t miss the stress of wedding planning. So I’m not surprised to hear stats that over a third of couples use AI to help bring their wedding together (via The Knot).
Personally, my fiancée and I have gone it (mostly) alone. Our only AI usage came recently when we asked Gemini to digitally combine the groomsmen suits we liked with a few tie and pocket square combinations so we could get a better sense of how everything looked without ordering dozens of possibilities to our home. It worked like a charm.
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I’ve put it to the test to see if it could have helped me book a venue. While it’s kinda handy, it doesn’t beat visiting dozens of venues in person.
The biggest part of your big day
Married couples will know this already, but your venue is the first big thing on your long wedding to-do list. Your venue’s availability will decide your date, the venue could have restrictions on what suppliers you can use, and it will likely be the most expensive part of your wedding (perhaps only beaten/tied by food and drink depending on your numbers).
In some cases, you also have to lock it in early — when my fiancée and I were looking in 2024/2025, we visited popular venues that were booked up until 2028 — and you can’t easily change your mind later.
We experienced a form of this when our first choice venue decided to cancel its event bookings — including our wedding — due to financial difficulties, forcing us to look elsewhere. Even with only a few suppliers booked, as it was still quite early in our planning process, finding a new venue we loved that was also in our budget and available on the date we had booked things for was a stressful struggle.
Could Bridebook’s ChatGPT integration have saved us? I logged into the LLM service and input this request, which matches what my fiancée and I were looking for:
“I’ve just got engaged, and I need a wedding reception venue. We’d like our wedding date to be in the next couple of years, and sometime in the summer so we can maximize the chance of great weather. Our ceremony is at [Name of our church], so we’d like our reception venue to be within a 45-minute drive (ideally less). The venue should give off ‘princessy vibes’ with a beautiful outside space and flowers for pictures. We have around 90 people coming for dinner, and a total of 130 people in the evening. We don’t mind what kind of catering the venue offers, but a venue with low or no corkage would be preferable. Also, we’d like the venue, food, and drink costs to be no more than £20,000. Thanks!”
The response starts with a carousel of venue options with a few key details, followed by a bullet point breakdown of some of the best picks based on my criteria.
Overall, the suggestions were a great starting point, but I quickly noticed some problems. First, it didn’t give me any idea of when venues were available, plus when giving pricing information, it gave us ranges rather than taking into account that Summer weddings (as the most popular) are usually at the upper end of those prices.
I also noticed that several venue costs were wrong based on what we had been quoted when venue hunting ourselves. This is an issue we found with Bridebook, as venues don’t seem to update their costs on the site — instead, they keep them hidden in brochures you don’t see until signing up for a visit.
Interestingly, the tool didn’t find the venue we ended up booking.
That said, ChatGPT wasn’t useless. While the information it was working with was wrong, it did accurately take my budget into account, and generally kept venue suggestions within a good distance of our church.
I also quite liked the quick general advice sections it added at the end of its answers — such as a budget reality check to help us temper expectations given the higher average costs of where we live, and advice on how to expand our search (such as looking at country homes and walled gardens alongside castles if we want a princess vibe).
In the end, however, I didn’t think AI was any more useful than just scrolling through Bridebook’s website or Google — in some ways, it was less useful as its finds were more restrictive than what a general search might spit out.
A real couple’s wedding advice
If you’re also disappointed by ChatGPT, instead of AI advice, here’s some advice from a real couple who have been going through the wedding planning process on how to find your venue.
1. Set up a wedding email address
You will need to give every venue and supplier a contact email address, and your inbox can quickly become cluttered — especially with your regular day-to-day emails mixed in. The best thing we did was set up a wedding email address early, where all of our venue information could be collected. It made finding details much easier, and we could share the inbox so both of us could see emails as they came in.
2. Don’t visit your favorite venue first
Your first venue visit will feel special, and if it’s to a venue you’ve already decided is great based on online research, it’s easy to overlook its faults — especially at the early stages when you won’t know what problems you should look out for.
In hindsight, being enamoured with our first venue made us unfairly dismiss locations we saw right after that, which might have been solid picks. Had we seen some other venues first, we could have more critically and fairly viewed the venues we liked the look of.
3. Don’t dismiss a venue too soon
In the same vein as my last point, even if a venue doesn’t tick all of your boxes, try to visit it if it does tick a few big ones. When our first venue cancelled, we had to widen our search pool to find a replacement and ended up visiting some venues we had dismissed because of factors we thought were dealbreakers.
One of our dealbreakers was that we 100% did not want a marquee, only for us to then choose a venue with one. Because we visited in person, we found out not all marquees are created equal (this one is much more impressive than others we had seen), and we also experienced some of the venue’s other incredible positives, like its picture-perfect location and excellent in-house catering.
4. Don’t go in a big group
Wedding planning can feel overwhelming, and, while well-meaning, you might find family can accentuate the problem by bombarding you with opinions.
Try to just visit venues as just a couple on your first visit. Going back later with family is essential to help whittle your decisions down (and to help you spot any positives/negatives you missed the first time), but we found that when trying to come up with our initial verdict, it was much easier discussing our thoughts as a pair rather than as a larger group.
5. Get pricing and capacity details before you visit
Lastly, if you can, get accurate venue details before you go. We wasted some afternoons and evenings showing up at venues and being toured round only to find out it couldn’t support our numbers or was wildly over budget — or in the case of one £48,000 venue we visited with a maximum capacity of 75, both.
With everything else going on with wedding planning, the last thing you want is to waste time with venues that would never work for you.
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
