As a wedding venue owner, if you want to make the wedding planning process easier for an engaged couple, you need to offer them a complete team of wedding planning specialists – in addition to your beautiful grounds. For example, UK-based GLOW Events offers couples a selection of 3 different wedding venues as well as a team of event planners, chefs and professional waiting staff.
All these people are committed to making sure everything goes smoothly before the wedding as well as on the big day itself. As Head of Marketing Emma Clark puts it, “the team’s mission is to create memories that make people glow. Every wedding we hold across our three wedding venues in Kent is a huge milestone in our couple’s lives and the lives of their families and friends too. We’re motivated to deliver the best experience possible. For us, the couple’s experience with our business begins from the moment they inquire about our services right up until the day of the wedding itself. There’s nothing more rewarding than delivering the perfect wedding for a couple you’ve been working with for months, or sometimes years, in advance and seeing that ‘just married’ glow.”
By putting together this team of experts, GLOW Events takes the hassle out of wedding planning, instead transforming the process into a memorable journey for the couple. In addition to pairing couples with experts to help them along the way, GLOW Events also offers each couple access to a comprehensive online planning tool, Sonas, which makes organizing any wedding easier.
How does Sonas work?
Sonas is an all-in-one software for wedding event management. The software is designed to deliver quality services while helping venues satisfy the unique needs of each couple seamlessly. The beauty of Sonas is that it helps the different teams involved in planning a wedding, including the couple themselves, collaborate to create the perfect wedding. An event venue can use the platform to move effortlessly from one stage of the wedding planning to the next, as well as from one wedding to the next.
As Emma explains, Sonas has helped them streamline their wedding planning process significantly. “Sonas helps us to coordinate a huge volume of weddings annually. In enables information about a couple’s wedding to be accessible across teams, which is invaluable in ensuring a perfect day. For example, the wedding coordinators need to ensure the necessary prep is completed in the months before the big day, and the venue set-up team on the day need to be able to deliver to the couple’s exact requirements.”
Wedding planning can be a daunting process for any couple. By inviting them aboard Sonas when they register, event venues can make this process much less stressful. The platform is built to ensure that couples can coordinate everything that they want for their big day with the different teams involved, to the most minute detail.
How Sonas can help overbooked venues to cope
While the pandemic stalled business in the wedding industry for a while, 2022 has marked the beginning of a bumper season. Over 320,000 couples who had postponed their weddings due to the pandemic are now optimistic that, with the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, 2022 or 2023 will be the year when they finally tie the knot.
Beyond simply easing restrictions, governments and event venues are making adjustments to ensure that these weddings will take place this year. For instance, in England, outdoor weddings have been approved indefinitely. Previously, outdoor weddings needed to be conducted within an enclosure such as a bandstand. Now, couples can have their weddings anywhere within the grounds of an event venue. On the other hand, wedding venues are now offering couples weekday slots as their more popular weekend slots fill up.
These adjustments are expected to help the wedding industry recover from the effects of COVID-19, which left over 400,000 employees in the UK in limbo for 2 years. In fact, industry experts are already predicting that the 2022 to 2023 period will bring in £28 billion in revenue for the UK wedding industry.
This recovery is good news for wedding planners, caterers, décor companies and florists. However, it also means that all these businesses are scrambling to catch up with the backlog of couples waiting to get married this year. In addition to the 280,000 newly engaged couples just entering the wedding pipeline in 2022, an average of 500,000 couples have been waiting in line since 2020.
This increased demand on wedding planning services is highlighting the need to move seamlessly from one wedding to the next while delivering quality services to each couple. It’s important to make each couple that walks through your doors feel special. In order to convince them that you and your team are 100% focused on their needs, you need a wedding planning system that works efficiently.
“We never intended to design a pandemic backlog solution,” says Sonas co-founder Mark Lynch. “Our goal has always been simply to help wedding venues manage their precious time and resources in the most intelligent way possible and we use tech as an enabler. What the pandemic backlog has done is accentuate some of the problems our software is designed to fix. In particular, this software is designed to help venues consistently run magical weddings under strict time, financial and spatial constraints. We’re seeing pent-up demand with wedding venues committed to offering all these couples the best experience for their big day but in many cases struggling with the operational implications behind the scenes. We’re here to offer our clients the tools they need to host one flawless wedding after another.”
As more and more wedding venues hunt for event planning software to help them deliver unforgettable experiences in mass, Sonas is standing out as the perfect tool. While there are other alternatives on the market, these software tools only address a handful of the challenges that wedding venues encounter regularly. As a result, venue owners find themselves having to piece together different solutions and move back and forth between software tools. Since Sonas was built in collaboration with the team at GLOW Events, it’s designed to meet every need that a wedding venue might have.
“The team at Sonas is incredibly responsive to our needs,” says Emma. “They really listen to our requirements, and work with us collaboratively to launch new features.”
The months and days leading up to a wedding can be incredibly stressful, and most engaged couples are facing wedding planning for the first time. With a software solution like Sonas, wedding venues can take some of the pressure off the couple as well as their teams. After all, Sonas is designed to help wedding planning teams to collaborate efficiently from one phase of wedding planning to the next. More importantly, Sonas is designed to make every wedding perfect.
Are you interested in using Sonas for your wedding venue? The good news is that if you’ve been using a different platform, the team at Sonas can help you transfer all your data so that nothing falls through the cracks. The even better news is that you can try the software out for free before you commit to using it.
