Event venues are in the business of making dreams come true for each client who walks through their doors. This is especially true when the event you’re hosting is a wedding. As a venue owner, your job is to take the event your client is picturing and transform it into reality while working within their budget. Weddings are more complex than most other events thanks to the ever-growing guest lists, conflicting tastes and last-minute changes involved.
This can be even more challenging to manage when you have an overflowing schedule packed with events back-to-back, as is the case at most UK wedding venues at the moment.
Every year, the wedding industry reports a total of 280,000 weddings. Out of this, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 320,000 weddings being postponed in the last two years. In addition to couples who postponed their weddings to 2022, wedding venues have to accommodate the 280,000 newly engaged couples in 2022.
Most wedding venues have turned to software tools to help them manage this backlog and continue to deliver unforgettable weddings effortlessly. Among the tools available on the market at the moment, the most comprehensive of all is Sonas – an all-in-one event management software designed in collaboration with wedding venue owners specifically for wedding venues.
Sonas was born when UK-based GLOW Events General Manager, Emmet Hannan, was looking for a software tool to help him manage the events at his business. At the time, all the options on the market only addressed some of his business needs. He then turned to his nephew, a skilled software developer, for help. One year later his nephew, Mark Lynch, had teamed up with Richard Lynch to develop an event management software that specializes in weddings. They named it “Sonas,” which means happiness and good fortune in Irish.
The team behind this software designed it to meet unique venue needs during the wedding planning process. While Sonas was not initially built to help with the backlog of weddings that event venues are dealing with now, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted problems that Sonas is built to solve. This includes how to consistently turn a couple’s wedding into a magical experience under strict time, financial and spatial constraints.
How event venues help newly engaged couples navigate wedding complexities
Getting engaged is a dream come true for a happy couple. After all, they’re about to embark on a lifelong journey with the person they love. Even so, after the excitement wears off, couples find themselves faced with the overwhelming task of planning a wedding. There’s an unending list of things to consider when you’re planning a wedding. When you take into consideration the budget, venue, guest list, food and décor, it’s easy to see why many couples opt for a civil ceremony.
Emma Clark, Head of Marketing at GLOW Events, knows just how stressful planning a wedding can be for a newly engaged couple. “It’s essential to make the wedding planning process as easy as possible for couples,” she says. “The lead up to a wedding can be highly stressful; there are finances to navigate, family politics to manage, and hours of admin to get through. Plus, couples are often planning a wedding for the very first time, so they aren’t sure what to expect or what to do next. As a venue, it’s crucial that you do everything you can to make the experience as easy as possible for them.”
Planning a wedding also highlights family expectations that might not have occurred to the couple beforehand. Struggling to meet these expectations while also planning a wedding that will make themselves happy can also bring up a lot of family drama for the couple. When you consider all these implications, it makes sense that some couples choose to elope rather than deal with such complexities.
However, despite all the logistics that go into wedding planning, most couples are still opting for a grand wedding where all their friends and family members can come and celebrate with them. After all, having a wedding where loved ones can celebrate with the couple makes for a truly unforgettable day. Many couples recognize the value of hosting a grand wedding and will put up with the complications it comes with because they know it’s worth it. As couples emerge from the endless lockdowns that plagued us at the onset of COVID-19, more couples are opting for a huge party rather than a small-scale wedding. In fact, with the increased demand for weddings, this sector will generate over £28 billion in revenue for the UK economy during the next 18 months to 2 years.
How wedding venues are adjusting to the increased demand
The start of 2022 marked a wedding boom in many parts of the world. In the U.S. this is the busiest wedding season in 40 years. In the UK, wedding venues are getting so booked up on weekends that many couples have started opting for weekday weddings. While the average wedding budget has been hit hard by inflation, most couples are planning to spend a little more to throw a shindig that makes up for the long wait.
While a CRM software was crucial before, it’s indispensable now, in what has quickly become a record year for the wedding industry. As couples scramble to book their dream wedding venue, wedding venues are scrambling to find ways to streamline their services. With event planning software, they can continue to offer each couple an unforgettable day tailored specifically to their tastes. More importantly, wedding-specific software helps venues to provide these services efficiently and transition from one wedding to the next seamlessly. This way, each couple feels like the venue dedicated 100% of their resources and attention to them and their guests, despite the fact that there is a long queue of couples waiting behind them.
When asked how they’re coping with the increased demand for their services, Emma Clark (head of marketing at Glow Events) says, “it’s bumper season for weddings, and that includes enquiries. Thankfully, Sonas allows us to provide an exceptional customer experience for our couples right from the point of enquiry to the event date. This means that even when our volume of enquiries increases tenfold, our customer service always remains high.”
Since Mark and Richard Lynch collaborated with the team at GLOW Events to build this software, Sonas has been uniquely positioned to meet the needs of wedding venues. Many businesses across Ireland and the UK are using Sonas to ensure that their weddings run smoothly. As the world heads into its busiest wedding season yet, Sonas is a great tool to help your wedding venue to continue making every wedding perfect. To get started with Sonas, you can visit their website or connect with the team on LinkedIn.
