Tips for Choosing A Wedding Venue

Hey bride and groom, feeling stressed about choosing a wedding venue? We totally understand! Choosing a venue is definitely one of the bigger decisions when it comes to planning a wedding, it’s where you’ll be spending your perfect day! We’re here to try to provide some tips from our personal experience to help make this decision just a little bit easier. 

The best way Alex and I found to narrow down our choices was to start with our preferred location. Alex and I got engaged in the Blue Ridge Mountains just outside of Asheville, NC. It was the perfect trip (March 2, 2019) and we knew we wanted to get married in the Blue Ridge Mountains without hesitation. We also knew because our family members were split between the Northeast and Southeast regions that this would be a great halfway point for everyone to meet.

We started by looking at venues online and from there we narrowed down our favorites, then planned a trip to Asheville to tour them all in ONE day (would not recommend this)! If you have more time to plan out your tours I highly suggest you do because it was a lot to take in and think about. You may also want to take a notebook and write the pros and cons of each venue. When looking for our perfect venue we found that almost every venue we toured had some sort of strings attached. Some required us to purchase in-house catering which took us way over our budget, and others required us to pick only from certain vendors or added on crazy extra costs for things we didn’t need. For some people this can be a big stress reliever, after all you can check off several items and at once and limit the number of vendors you need to find. 

For me and Alex, what we wanted was something totally customizable, where we could have the freedom to choose every aspect of our wedding day because it’s OUR day, and we wanted to choose everything! With a mountain view in our hearts and wanting the freedom to customize our wedding the way we wanted, we decided to choose a vineyard, called Point Lookout Vineyards in Hendersonville, NC. They had the most BEAUTIFUL view of the mountains, a large cross outside, and they let us hire whoever we wanted as our vendors, give or take some small details. Although it was a little over our budget, allowing us to choose our own vendors helped us save costs in other areas of the wedding, so we were able to have the wedding of our dreams. 

At the end of the day, the best advice we can give about choosing a venue is to do your research, get a feel for the venue staff (ours was great), and imagine having your perfect day at the venue you choose. 

***The photos below were taken by our wedding photographer Eugene Svirhun***