Overseas Wedding Nightmare

Help1988

I am desperate for any advice I can get - all my worst wedding nightmares have come true.

My partner and I are due to get married in Sorrento, Italy on 27th June. Due to the pandemic, the council will not issue us the paperwork that we paid for which enables us to legally marry in Italy, my dress fittings have been cancelled so my dress is two sizes too big, the wedding party have no suits, I won't be able to get my hair or any treatments done, and the venue in Italy have admitted it is unlikely that the official body in Italy would be able to process our paperwork in time for us to legally marry, even if by some miracle the council here allowed us to have it so that we could courier it to Italy, as the process takes 7 weeks. My guests all want an answer so they can cancel or change their travel plans, and I have no information for them - we are both so stressed.

The venue in Italy are going to provide us with a back-up date for August 2021 instead, but refuse to acknowledge that the wedding in June can't go ahead, and are telling us to keep organising and getting ready for June 27th - even though their own borders are unlikely to be open by then. The responses I get from them are so relaxed, "everything is fine here, we will be back to normal by 27th June, we are all fine, there is nothing for you to worry about, all of the things you mention can be fixed in time (by them at a cost), and we can give you a symbolic blessing instead of a real legal ceremony (which we have told them we do not want)".

We are desperate for them to confirm the postponement to next August, but they won't because they are insistent it can go ahead in June. I am so worried that the borders will reopen in time, and the wedding will technically be able to go ahead with a blessing, and there will be no legally binding reason actually preventing us from getting married on 27th June, and it will just be miserable because nothing will be ready, (I won't even be able to wear my wedding dress as it's so big).

My questions are three-fold, and just to give some context we do have wedding insurance with John Lewis specifically for weddings abroad which we took out way before the pandemic, but their stipulations are many - and we are concerned about how we word things with the venue.

- If the wedding is able to go ahead, but not as a legally binding ceremony which we do not want, are we likely to be able to claim on our insurance if we are the ones saying we don't want to go ahead with it in June, based on the fact that this is not what we booked when we paid our deposit?
- If we contact the venue to say we want to postpone, and we don't want to wait to find out if June can go ahead, are our insurers likely to pay postponement costs? If it is our choice and not by necessity, we are worried this would affect their likelihood of paying out.
- If we cancel completely (because this has all turned into such a headache, we can't legally marry there in June and we just want this nightmare to be over), and the venue won't give us our money back, are John Lewis likely to pay out? It would be our choice, again, and not by necessity.

We haven't contacted John Lewis about any of this yet as we are worried about alerting them to anything too soon, and we know we have to tread carefully with this as their stipulations are so complex, we don't want to call them one week and say one thing, then call the next and say another conflicting thing - we want the best chance of getting our money back in all of these scenarios. Also, John Lewis won't actually let you speak to them unless your wedding is int he next 2 weeks.

So grateful for any advice anyone can give, we are tearing our hair out and we can't get any sense from the venue, they just keep telling us how fine and wonderful everything is and reject reality because obviously they need the money.

Thank you so much x

Jeremy535897

On looking at the process required just in the UK for marriages of UK citizens in Italy, I would say there is really very little likelihood of getting everything done by 27 June. Perhaps the first step is to see what, if any, lifting of lockdown is going to happen following the review that has to take place by 8 May. If the council offices are still not going to process the paperwork, then I can't see you legally marrying in Italy on 27 June. As I am sure you will know, the CNI has to be displayed for 28 days.

You have to decide what your priority is. Is your priority to have a wonderful social occasion focused around a ceremony, or is your priority to be married in front of your friends? I think you are saying the latter, so I think if 8 May comes and goes without helping, you will seriously have to consider cancelling. The problem is that, without knowing what you paid and the terms of the venue for the wedding, or the full details of your insurance, nobody can advise you what the cost to you might be. Italian contract law will also play a part. No doubt there will be many other costs of flights, travel and accommodation, and I can understand the concerns of your guests. If they are paying to get to Italy, will they be able to get refunds if the wedding is cancelled?

If you say you are cancelling on 9 May, you run the risk of no refund, no insurance and guests out of pocket. But you have some certainty. If you don't cancel, and the wedding venue postpones, at that point you lose the risk of getting no refund and not being to claim under the insurance, although you and your guests might still have flights they cannot get refunds for. If you don't cancel and it can go ahead, you run the risk of not enjoying the occasion, and you probably won't actually be legally married at the wedding. I would imagine that, with a bit of ingenuity, you could find a way of overcoming the problem of the ill fitting dress.

If I were in this situation, I would wait to see what happens about lockdown on 8 May, but assuming that doesn't solve anything, I would say I wanted to go ahead, even if that meant a blessing rather than a wedding itself. I would talk to my closest friends about whether they still wanted to go to Italy in June first though. If the venue then postpones, most of the financial risk has abated. I am sure everyone would understand about the lack of the bit of paper for the wedding itself. As an aside, I know that there can be difficulties from Italian marriages when things go wrong in the future, not that you want to hear that at this point in time.

hb2

I'm not arguing with Jeremy regarding your rights - he knows his stuff and I respect him greatly - but I will say that I wouldn't want to go ahead and have a party without a properly legal wedding. I know that other views will differ and it is down to the OP to decide what is important to them.