Finding Alternative Wedding Venues: 2 Common Problems with Traditional Venues

If you have been planning your wedding for even a short time, you know how discouraging it can be. If you’re planning an ethical or alternative wedding, the search can become even more complicated. Here's some advice on choosing an alternative wedding venue and two things to watch out for in most traditional venues.


Some people seem to know exactly where they want to get married, but if you’re anything like us, you probably feel that there are simultaneously too many venue options and too few. In other words, you’ve researched hundreds of possible locations, but none of them seems to fit your vision of an alternative wedding.

As Allison describes in her post about 10 questions to ask yourself when choosing a venue for your alternative wedding, there are many criteria to consider. This one has weird lighting, that one is too expensive, that other one has restrictive policies...

Don’t give up! I want to share the story of how we found an affordable and alternative wedding venue that allowed us to create the non-traditional, ethical wedding we had pictured. In this first part I explore two frequent problems that we encountered while exploring the usual self-proclaimed “wedding” venues.

 

Avoiding the “wedding tax"

We were getting married in November in Colorado, so we were restricted to indoor venues. We felt like we had exhausted all the possible options. We had narrowed our choice down to some well-known event spaces that could handle a group of about 120 and weren’t prohibitively expensive. The problem was that none of them fit our vision of an alternative wedding; there was nothing wrong with them, but none of them met our vision and values of an ethical, alternative wedding.

While these venues weren’t “prohibitively expensive,” they all still managed to cost much more than we had expected. While the fee for renting the space might be reasonable, I soon discovered that there are many hidden costs.

As you know, whenever a product or service is associated with the word “wedding,” the price surges (the so-called “wedding tax”). Wedding vendors of all kinds know that wedding budgets have skyrocketed, and they are doing whatever they can to get a piece of this pie. If you’ve browsed caterers, you know what I’m talking about. At one point we saw two menus from the same caterer: the meals were the same, but those listed on the “wedding menu” were between 30-50% more expensive!

It doesn’t have to be this way! As I explain in a post about the benefits of planning an alternative wedding on a budget, part of having an ethical wedding means thinking carefully about where your money goes. As I’ll explain in part two of this post, thinking outside the box and looking for alternative wedding venues can allow you to avoid the wedding tax and to make sure that your money supports a good cause—not just the wedding industry.

Dealing with restrictive venues and policies

Another danger in planning an alternative wedding is that anything involved in the wedding industry tends to promote a “boxed wedding.” Traditional venues often limit your options for an alternative wedding: they host lots of weddings in more or less the same fashion, so they might not have the resources, flexibility, or willingness to help you realize your vision of an ethical or alternative wedding.

More often than not, self-proclaimed wedding venues have their own set way of doing things. It is very likely that their way is not your way. I have yet to see an advertised wedding venue that caters to the minority that is interested in non-traditional weddings (which makes sense, given that there is no one model for alternative weddings).

If a wedding venue immediately presents you with a long list of policies and restrictions, be careful! Will you be able to have the kind of wedding YOU want, or will it be the kind of wedding that the VENUE wants? This brings me back to the first downside: often these policies are ways of forcing you to spend more money than you may have anticipated. At most self-proclaimed wedding venues, everything has a price (and rarely is it a low one!)

The ideal wedding venue for a non-traditional or alternative wedding has very few restrictions on the details of your ceremony and reception: it is essentially a blank canvas on which you can you can project your own plans. The ideal event coordinator is happy to deviate from the standard program and help you realize your own vision. Of course, even the most liberal venue must be mindful of avoiding liability, so don't expect to find a venue that has no policies at all!

In part two, I’ll explain some tricks to find a venue that gives you freedom to have an alternative wedding. I’ll also tell you about the hidden gem that we discovered for our alternative wedding!