Advice to help make rescheduling your wedding easier in the event of a coronavirus postponement.
So you’ve spent a year or two planning your wedding. You’ve gone to wedding fairs; you’ve emailed a bazillion people; viewed a million photo galleries; watched 80 hours of wedding videos; read blogs; watched more bands than you’ll find at Glastonbury, and read magazines, until it felt like your eyes were melting; ate your weight in cake… ok, the last bit isn’t really a chore, but still, it’s tough planning a wedding. But then, comes that magical moment when everything is booked and you get to relax in the run-up to your big day.
Until a massive global pandemic breaks out and four weeks before your wedding you’re forced to reschedule everything you’d spent months putting in place.
Stress City.
We’re not going to tell you to relax and keep calm because let’s face it, everyone is telling you that and it’s probably making you want to run to the hills screaming. Instead, we’re going to offer a little advice that we hope can make things a little easier to reschedule everything.
Talk to your venue
First things first, talk to your wedding venue. That should be your first port of call. They can give you advice and offer you alternate dates later in the year or next year. PLEASE be understanding with them - you’re stressed rearranging one wedding, they’re probably juggling dozens.
Talk to your suppliers
You’ve taken great care and time to choose the suppliers you wanted to work at your wedding, so you probably want them to do the rescheduled date. Any we’ve spoken to have said they’re honouring original deposits and prices, so it’s just a matter of moving the date.
So how do you coordinate between all your wedding suppliers without losing your sanity? To quote a famously annoying Apple advert, there’s an app for that.
Using Xoyondo (or Doodle) to reschedule a wedding postponed by Coronavirus (Covid-19)
Xoyondo is a free scheduling app that makes rescheduling (and scheduling) a breeze. First, get the potential dates from your venue. Then, input them into Xoyondo and share it with your suppliers. They can fill in which dates are free in their calendar and you can easily find a match. Here’s how you do it:
There are other apps that can do this such as doodle, but we like that Xoyondo is both simple to use and mostly free.
Be realistic and flexible with your dates
You will quickly find that your suppliers and venue have limited dates in key months. Saturdays in August will have been mostly booked up before the coronavirus pandemic, so you might have to be a little open-minded about what you can get.
If you had booked a spring wedding in March or April, we think you’ll love an autumn wedding in late September or early October. In fact, October is one of our favourite times to shoot thanks to the gorgeous autumn colours, but it’s not an especially busy time of year.
If you want to have an August or early September wedding, consider holding your wedding midweek. We had our wedding on a Wednesday in September and loved the midweek vibe. Our guests were only too happy to take a day or two off work and our friends who worked weekends were delighted. We then kept the party going long into the weekend.
Hannah and Chris had an Autumn wedding but still had an outdoor ceremony, speeches AND first dance!
Leave it a year?
Another option is to move your wedding to 2021. This way you stand a better chance of having it closer to the original date, and it’s more likely all your original suppliers and venue will have availability.
You can then use the time to focus your energy on helping friends and loved ones through what is a difficult time for everyone. We keep saying it, but it’s important right now to have some perspective on what the most important things in life are.