Venues Are Years Behind the Micro Wedding

Twenty guests is not a hard wedding to host. One long table, one round of speeches nobody has to shout over, a lunch that finishes while the light is still good. Twenty guests is a hard wedding to buy.

Nobody is going to turn you away. That is not the problem. The problem is that the day you want has never been built as a thing you can buy. It reaches you as a subtraction: a room measured for two hundred, with a hundred and eighty people taken back out.

What the rooms are built for

Of the 614 venues here, 436 publish a maximum capacity you can read straight off the page, and the median is 200 guests. Seventy-three publish a ceiling of 400 or more. Fourteen publish a maximum of fifty or fewer; six of those stop at thirty or fewer.

For every venue that says out loud that it tops out at fifty or fewer, five say they will take four hundred.

The rest published nothing, and nothing is not a refusal: a venue that never named a number has not told you it will turn your twenty away. But it has not sold you anything either. A product is a thing whose shape you can see before you enquire.

The trade that answered

Photographers looked at the same couple and built them something to buy. Of 300 photographers here with a readable minimum, 135 publish an entry package of two hours or fewer. That is not a discount rail bolted to the bottom of a price list. It is a shorter job, sold as one.

One Hobart photographer publishes two ladders on one page. The small one is sold by the hour: $650 buys one, $2,450 buys four. The wedding ladder does not open until four hours at $3,050, and runs to ten hours at $4,900. Two products, one business, no second brand invented to keep them apart.

A Bunbury photographer does the thing venues do not. She prices by guest count and by the clock at once, three tiers deep, every figure published as a starting price.

• From $600: a maximum of two hours, up to 10 guests, 50 edited images.
• From $850: a maximum of three hours, up to 30 guests, 100 images.
• From $1,250: a maximum of five hours, up to 50 guests, 150 images.

A Melbourne photographer sells an elopement and micro-wedding collection from $3,100 for two hours, with a minimum of 130 images, alongside a six-hour wedding collection with a minimum of 400. The small collection is not the big one with its hours shaved off. It has its own floor, its own image count and its own buyer.

None of that took a revolution. Somebody sat down, decided what a small wedding is, and put a number on it.

The venues that did the work

Now try the same across 614 venues. Exactly two publish a maximum of ten people. One is a winery in a restored 1860s stone woolshed on the Riddoch Highway at Coonawarra:

A special elopement package just for two, or you can add a few family or friends

Ten including the couple, stated twice on its own page. The other is an architectural house on the water at Swansea, on Tasmania's east coast: “Ideal for parties of 2-10 people, our elopement weddings offer an intimate experience”. Widen the net to thirty and you get six venues in all, and three of those six numbers are not what they look like.

One Townsville venue prices the way a photographer does, by headcount and by clock: 1.5 hours for up to 6 guests at $6,990, two hours for up to 18 at $9,790, three hours for up to 38 at $11,990, with celebrant, photography, cake and coordination inside the number. Dry hire sits alongside at $2,400, but that buys up to twelve hours, so it is a different purchase, not a cheaper version.

One Limestone Coast venue does the plainest thing a venue can do for a small wedding. It publishes a price. Elopements run to 30 guests with four hours of venue hire, $600 Monday to Thursday and $800 Friday to Sunday. Then read what sits behind it. The venue offers, in its own words, “a sustainable wedding ceremony venue, specialising in elopements and micro-weddings”, off-grid on 12 acres, with no catering, beverage or reception space published. Six hundred dollars buys four hours of ground, not a wedding, and the venue has never said otherwise.

A house outside Mudgee sleeps ten, takes up to 35 for the ceremony, and charges for beds rather than for the occasion: “Wedding bookings come at no extra cost.” What you pay is the tariff: $900 a night Sunday to Thursday, $1,250 on Friday, Saturday and public holidays, and a wedding is a three-night booking, because special events carry a three-night minimum. No catering, no package, no per-head rate; the house is self-contained and every supplier is yours to find. Three nights with a wedding in the middle of them is a real thing to buy. It is not a wedding with a price on it.

One venue in the Byron hinterland publishes a floor as well as a ceiling: “Micro weddings for groups of 20 to 40 adults.” A minimum is what a business writes down once it has decided who the product is for. The money arrives in pieces: $125 a head for the shared long lunch and a $50 a head minimum beverage spend, both before GST, with outdoor dining setup and staffing charged at $800 on top. Separate charges rather than one total. Of the twelve Byron Bay venues here, seven publish a capacity at all. The other six read 220, 150, 150, 100, 100 and 75. Only this one named a smallest as well as a largest.

Nobody agrees what the number means

Here is the other half of the indictment. In photography an entry package has a shape a reader knows on sight: hours, images, sometimes a guest cap. In venues, the capacity figure is barely a unit.

One Albany winery has a 25 on its site. The 25 is not a capacity. It is furniture: the two larger packages each include 25 mismatched wooden chairs, and the smallest includes 12. The single explicit guest number on the site sits on the midweek package, “a mid week, three hour DIY package to enjoy with up to 10 of your loved ones”, at $6,400 plus GST. A chair count is not a capacity, and nobody is obliged to publish either one. But a trade that had built this product would not leave a reader working out which of its numbers is which.

A farm on Tasmania's east coast publishes two different maximums on two of its own pages: “an intimate wedding for 6 guests or a micro celebration of up to 15” on one, “Elopements and small weddings (up to 20 people)” on the other. Nothing on the site reconciles them, so the honest reading is a wedding of somewhere between 6 and 20, not a settled ceiling. A BYO restaurant in South Townsville writes “Intimate Gatherings: Accommodate 12-20 guests for the ceremony and up to 30 for a delightful reception”: a ceremony band and a separate reception ceiling, two numbers for two parts of one day.

Not one of those venues is hiding anything. Every figure is published in plain sight, and every one is accurate to the thing it describes. But a couple reading three venue pages on a Sunday night is reading three different units, and she has to work out what each number counts before she can compare them. Reading three photographers, she would have been comparing hours by the second page.

What the couple is actually buying

A venue built for 200 is not behaving badly by being built for 200. It has a kitchen sized for a service, a staff roster and fixed costs that do not halve when the guest list does. Nobody should expect a ballroom to sell twenty covers at a twentieth of the price, and not one of these businesses is doing anything worse than describing itself accurately.

No single room is at fault, and that is exactly the trouble. Photographers looked at a couple who wanted two hours and built them a two-hour product with a price on it. The people who own the rooms have mostly left the twenty-guest wedding for the couple to assemble, out of a rented house, a caterer, a celebrant and a great deal of email. A workable day. Not a product.

One island retreat in the Whitsundays, reached by private water transfer, has done the design work: a published maximum of 20 and a separate elopement package. Ask what it costs and you are at the enquiry form. The same at the farm on Tasmania's east coast. The same at the South Townsville restaurant.

The fix is not complicated, and a handful of businesses have already published it. Decide how many people the day is for. Decide how long it runs. Put a number beside both. That is all a photographer's collection has ever been, and it is why a twenty-guest couple can price the photography off a public page in ten minutes while the room takes a fortnight of email. Somebody will sell this wedding as a product with a price on it. Every enquiry form in the country is helping them get there.