Ask What Happens If You Have to Move the Date

You ring at ten past four on a Tuesday, because that is when you remembered, and you ask the question every wedding article tells you to ask. What happens if we have to move the date?

The woman on the other end is lovely about it. We would work with you. We are pretty flexible. Nobody wants that for you.

She means it, and she did not write the contract. None of what she just said is in it. You cannot hold a kindness against an invoice fourteen months later, when somebody is sick, or pregnant, or grieving, or you have simply had the worst year of your lives.

The businesses that answer properly answer in writing, and the answer is a ladder of dates.

The answer is a ladder of dates

One Gippsland venue publishes its whole ladder in three sentences.

If you cancel more than six months out, only the deposit is forfeited. Cancellations made between three and six months out incur a 50% cancellation fee. If you cancel within 90 days of your date, the full balance remains payable.

Read the third one twice. Within ninety days, the full balance remains payable. Not the deposit. Not half. All of it, whether or not anybody eats the food.

My instinct on first reading that was to be annoyed, and the annoyance was misplaced. Nobody is cheating you. A venue that loses a Saturday inside ninety days does not get another one: the staff are rostered, the food is on order, and nobody takes that date at three months notice. Somebody turned other work away to hold it for you, and the fee is the reason it was yours.

What matters is knowing the shape of it before you sign. Each business puts its rungs where it likes: the deposit out past four or six months, half in the middle, all of it inside the last fortnight at some places and the last three months at others. Then read what the percentage is a percentage of, because half the event cost, half the catering and the whole reception are three different sums.

The ones who publish it put all of it where you can read it before you enquire, down to the line asking for notice of a cancellation in writing. Nobody had to ring up and ask.

Postponing is not the same as cancelling

Nobody sets out to cancel a wedding. What happens, when something happens, is that the date has to move: a diagnosis, a posting overseas, a pregnancy, a funeral. So the question is not really about calling it off. It is whether the date can move, and on what notice.

The answers run from generous to none. At some venues a change of date is not available: move and you are cancelling, and the ladder above is the one you are on. At others a postponement inside a few months of the day is treated as a cancellation and the deposit is kept. Both are published, and both are arithmetic rather than unkindness. The room was held, the day came off the list, other couples were told it had gone.

And where a postponement is allowed, the terms can move with it. One McLaren Vale winery will hold a change of date on more than fourteen months notice, and publishes what the new date asks in return: a Friday or a Saturday, an eighty person minimum either way, and two add-ons it makes compulsory, drinks before the ceremony and a midnight finish. None of that looks like a charge, which is what makes it the one to watch. A couple who moved a Sunday wedding for sixty has agreed to a Saturday for eighty, with both add-ons on top, and knew it before they signed.

The reason is worth more than the word

Non-refundable is not one word either. Photographers are the easiest place to see it: 209 of them here say what it takes to hold a date, and the ones who name a figure are nowhere near each other. Some ask $150. Some ask $2,000. Where it is a share of the total rather than a flat fee it runs from a tenth to a half. So the word alone tells you nothing. One Byron Bay photographer even calls her booking fee non-refundable and then publishes what she actually does with it: a full refund if she can rebook the date. The fee covers a real loss, so where the loss does not happen, neither does the charge.

The same instinct turns up at the hard end. At some businesses cancelling returns nothing at any notice: the deposit stays, and so does every instalment paid after it. One homestead west of Geelong publishes a term like that with the reason beside it, which is that a wedding booked far in advance often leaves a date nobody can fill inside twelve months.

The reason is the part worth having. It lets you judge whether a term is fair rather than merely unwelcome, and judge it before you sign rather than in a PDF in the worst week of your life. Which is all you can fairly ask of anybody you hire: not a softer term, but a term with its reasoning attached.

And whose insurance is this, exactly?

Hire a council hall or a civic centre and the answer is you. Public liability of not less than ten million dollars per occurrence is ordinary for a public building, and the sort of clause a couple reads three times without noticing that it is homework. A venue's function terms do a related thing about your suppliers, in two clauses that belong together. Every external supplier must hold current public liability insurance. The venue accepts no responsibility for supplier performance or conduct. Fair enough, too, since they did not choose your caterer.

Put those two clauses beside everything above. You are not signing one contract with one ladder on it. You are signing a venue's, a photographer's, a caterer's and a florist's, on four sets of dates written without reference to each other, and every gap between them is yours. Move the wedding and you open four conversations, each on a different rung, and the venue that happily waves you across to a new Saturday cannot make your photographer free on it.

Some places take the whole question off your desk. A Coffs Harbour estate says simply that it takes care of cleaning and liability insurance, worth real money where you bring your own everything. A Bungendore inn reserves a second space free of charge and calls it rain contingency insurance for a garden wedding, which is the wet weather plan written as a policy rather than a promise.

Put it in an email

Not on the phone, and before the deposit, so it exists in writing. Ask everybody for the cancellation and postponement terms in full, as they will appear in the contract, then ask why about any rung that looks hard. And two it may not answer on its own: whether the deposit comes back if they resell the date, and who is responsible if a supplier you booked does not arrive.

Then put every ladder that comes back on one page, in date order, counting backwards from the wedding. Twenty minutes, and worth every one of them. What you stand to lose does not rise smoothly: it steps, on a handful of dates you could write in a diary tonight, and at one of them it stops being the deposit and becomes half the wedding.

You are unlikely ever to need any of this, and that is the point. It is the only part of planning a wedding that is not about the wedding. It is about the version of the year that does not go the way you expected, and the kindest thing anybody you hire can do is tell you the truth about that version now, in writing, at ten past four on a Tuesday, while you are still happy.