Wedding Venue Deposit - Non-refundable?

Rockporkchop · 25 August 2009 at 2:06PM

octoman wrote: »

The way they have spoken to us has been very rude and they do come across that even in the event of my death they would keep the deposit!

Of course they would keep it - they have clearly stated that the deposit is non refundable.

There is no excuse for them being rude but this on/off business with your wedding is a bit strange and it is a recession after all so they are probably a bit put out that they do not have the guaranteed booking they thought they had. You don't know if they had to turn another couple down because you had booked the date - they could have lost a lot of money.

To be honest I would steer clear of looking at future wedding venues for the time being if I were you. If your relationship was so bad that you had to break up a matter of weeks ago I don't think I would even plan a Christmas holiday, let alone a wedding next summer.

clearing_out_my_pockets · 25 August 2009 at 3:51PM

I'd chalk this one down to experience - when OH & I got engaged we spoke to a lot of venue wedding coordinators. One of our 'make or break' questions was whether the deposit was transferrable. Of course if I split up with OH I wouldn't expect to get my deposit back BUT if I had to push the wedding back I'd hope that given enough notice, my deposit would be transferrable to the new date. If a venue wanted to keep the old deposit as well as a second deposit for rearranging, that venue was off our list.

Your original venue was in Maidstone - where are you based and how far are you willing to travel? There are some lovely venues in Kent... depending on budget of course!

octoman · 25 August 2009 at 4:48PM

clearing_out_my_pockets wrote: »

I'd chalk this one down to experience - when OH & I got engaged we spoke to a lot of venue wedding coordinators. One of our 'make or break' questions was whether the deposit was transferrable. Of course if I split up with OH I wouldn't expect to get my deposit back BUT if I had to push the wedding back I'd hope that given enough notice, my deposit would be transferrable to the new date. If a venue wanted to keep the old deposit as well as a second deposit for rearranging, that venue was off our list.

Your original venue was in Maidstone - where are you based and how far are you willing to travel? There are some lovely venues in Kent... depending on budget of course!

Maidstone is where she is from......Bickley is very near to where we live now.

lol, but when we mentioned to her mother that we were looking local all hell broke loose as she always had that dream about her daughter getting married locally (which is fair enough as it is tradition).

.....so we are thinking about taking everyone's advice on this thread and delaying the wedding....we've got a house which we are in the middle of doing up so that can have our money!!!!

thanks for everyone's comments....newbie to moneysavingexpert but not for long :beer:

clearing_out_my_pockets · 25 August 2009 at 7:46PM

My advice would be to go for a venue that suits the pair of you rather than your respective parents.... Sets a dangerous precedent otherwise!

Rider99 · 27 August 2009 at 12:50PM

OK may be a bit machiavellian - but if you feel you've been mis-treated by the original venue, is it worth stringing them along until it will be very difficult for them to re-sell the date? Or is that just harsh?

ema_o · 27 August 2009 at 1:08PM

octoman wrote: »

the silly thing is that I can be a pain and not release the date to the last second thus minimising the timeframe to rebook (not nice I know!), even if they offered a 50% return then we would free the date up straight away!

Sorry to repost the same thing, but I don't think I made myself clear last time.

If I were in your position I would point out to the venue the last date you can cancel by (eg 2 weeks before the wedding or whatever it is in the T&Cs). Then mention to them how difficult it would be for them to get another booking with just 2 weeks to go rather than if you cancel now (I can't remember how far away it was but I think there is still a reasonable way to go).
Then suggest that if they could return a % of the deposit as a goodwill guesture you would be happy to confirm cancellation sooner rather than later.

I am not sure if it will work, but to me it sounds like a win win situation, if you cancel and they can't rebook they will miss out on a lot more than your £1000 deposit so they might just go for it.

londongirl · 27 August 2009 at 4:21PM

My parents paid a huge depost about £1500 i think it was and it was also supposed to be non-refundable. When i actually called the wedding off my mum wrote to them , a nice letter basically asking if they could see it in their hearts to compromise and return just 50% of the deposit if they managed to rebook the date. We had had excellent service from them all the way along and so i think it was fair to let them keep the £750 - as they had spent time emailing ask, we had done a tasting of the food, they had researched different things for us etc. £750 is still a lot even for the few months they had done this for us, but not as much as £1500. I wonder if you wrote a well worded letter to someone in the management team rather than phoning up that they might feel more likely to consider the option of returning some of the deposit. On the other hand we lost other deposits too - such as for the photographer (but was only £100) but in a way I think its fair enough. If you are told its non-refundable i think they must get so many people cancelling for whatever reason. I guess for my own situation i was so glad to get out of the relationship and my parents were glad i had done too that the money wasn't the biggest issue in the world in fact i would have paid twice that just so i dind't have to go through with it!
Even if you had wedding insurance it wouldn't have covered it as it doesn't cover people splitting up or getting cold feet.
Try writing a letter and see where its gets you.
As for the thought that you are now thinking of still getting married but elsewhere - all i can say is please wait! Don't do anything hasty about re-booking, yes getting married can be a stressful occasion but if you have split up and now thinking of getting back together i would really urge you to just get back together for 6 months or so at least before you think about re-booking the wedding otherwise you could find yourself even worse off with more deposits going down the drain - or worse still one of you going through with something that you know isn't right just because of the money. Having nearly done that myself I hope you don't mind me passing on the advice! I know everyone is different and hopefully you will work things out and go on to get married but please don't rush!

octoman · 19 November 2009 at 8:32AM

an update.....

I wrote a letter back in September explaining exactly how we felt - they initially were surprised that we no longer wanted to get married there, but did not want to add to our problems.....

after several phone calls and letters and as we gave them plenty of time to rebook the date, they decided to refund 100% of the deposit :-)

so thank you venue - we have since rebooked a new venue, and as oompahloompah says....make sure you are 100% happy with the new venue - which after this we certainly made sure!!!!!