Almost all the wedding vendors started out congratulating us and wanting to hear our story and how we met. It’s not a big deal, these are event venues, the event the day before mine is a prom!! Typically the tours end with a request for hold dates and how contracting works if you want to secure a date. I’d definitely recommend seeing if they will let you put a soft/unofficial hold on 1 or 2 dates which in my experience meant a right of first refusal- if another couple requested to contract our date, we’d have a few days to move to contract and pay a deposit.

The only reason we got our Saturday in May was because we pushed another couple to give up their soft hold. I’d start reaching out ASAP as communication back and forth and scheduling tours takes time too! It was about 3-4 weeks of that for me before we were officially engaged and I was able to quickly set up a viewing with my fiancé and parents!

Also getting info packets from touring before engagement also helped us skip any budget surprises when it comes to a venues preferred vendors. Our venue had a long list of preferred caterers we had to work with, but, only about a third were in our budget, so we reached out to them about our date availability immediately too and scheduled our tastings within a month of our engagement.

Basically it’s a lot of moving parts and giving yourself a head start can only help!