How to have a Free Wedding (almost), if you ‘work it right’

• When:

Sun to Thurs and selected Fridays in next 6 – 8 months.

• Who:

Works best for couples with at least 50 guests staying overnight, and 70 or more to the wedding.  

• Why:

Cost of living crisis mandates an innovative approach to weddings; this method works if you have a business minded / entrepreneurial and ‘event organising’ mindset.  

• How:

As a venue owner I have long dreamed of being able to offer ‘free weddings’ as in theory we would be busy every day. How could we run a wedding without a full team of catering staff, with no front of house, and no cleaning etc?

It can be done, if you organise it this way.

Are you ready to plan this option?  

Traditional wedding packages all include

a full-service wedding,

ceremony room,

welcome drinks,

drinks package,

wedding banquet,

evening buffet.

We can offer a full wedding package and we have some excellent offers.

But with the extraordinary cost of living crisis, and huge extra costs imposed on small businesses, the cost of providing a full wedding package has escalated while your own budget, what you can afford, has gone down.

While you may not have the budget for a wedding, you probably do have the guests.

This means you can ‘fill the venue’, fill the bedrooms, and your guests will buy drinks.

So let's see how you can arrange your wedding reception and catering, almost for free.

Craig y Nos Castle offers dry hire of the Conservatory is £1,390.

Local street food style caterers can be booked at £15 a head. This means you could host a wedding for 100 guests at a total cost of

(1) venue hire £1390,

(2) Hire own bar at £500, and

(3) allow from £1500 for food at £15/head.

Total spend for 100 guests is £3390

And you may be happy with this.

After all, it is not a high price for 100 guests!

Say you hire the bar and sell your own drinks, at a typical hotel mark up (normally a multiple of 2.5 to 3 times cost) on beverages.

You can cover all your venue hire (£1390), using your bar sales profits. That’s easy.

And you’ll have money left over for some of the catering.

How much might you make over the bar?

Our average bar spend in 2024 (with about half staying overnight), was £35 a head. Guests driving home will spend less, guests staying overnight will spend more on drinks, so you want everyone staying overnight.  

With average bar sales of £35 / guest, on 100 guests, that is £3,500. This should give you around £2,000 profit after allowing for the cost of purchasing your own beer and wines to sell on your bar.

I had above: "Total spend for 100 guests is £3390."

Take off £2000 profit above, leaves £1390.

What you achieve next, all depends on your B&B use:

Our rooms are £150 B&B per night for two in an en-suite room. It’s £50 per extra person in a family room.

25 rooms B&B = £3750.

On midweek dates we offer Room Only for two, at £99 / en-suite room. It’s £35 each for extra occupants in the family rooms.

25 rooms X £99 = £2475

So if you had 50 guests book in and pay you on a B&B basis at £150 per en suite, in our 25 en-suite rooms, (not including all the extras you can place in family rooms and non en-suites), that is £3750 B&B income.

We supply 25 rooms to you on ‘room only’, £99 each, = £2475.

Guests book your rooms on a B&B basis at £3750 (guests pay you not us), you only pay the 'room only' rate of £2475 to us, so` you gross £1275 profit.

You had £1390 left to pay above, after your £2,000 estimated bar profit/

You make £1275 on the rooms, leaves £115 to pay, for your wedding, the venue, the bar, and street food catering.

Plus, of course, the breakfasts to organise!

So if you work the bar, and work the B&B option, and get 50 to stay overnight, you can now understand how the cost of the venue, bar hire and food, is almost completely cancelled out by bar sales and B&B occupancy.

How much will breakfast cost?

Either

1. Allow maybe £5 per head for self catering the breakfasts yourself, 50 guests = £250, plus some labour cost to whoever is doing the cooking and cleaning (ideally volunteers who can cook up a breakfast). This could be quite a social affair the next morning with everyone mucking in and a few chosen helpers to cook up a breakfast, toast and coffee.

Or to save the hassle and just

2. Send your guests to the neighbouring café for breakfast. They’ll pay £8 per head for a basic breakfast at the café in country park or £12 for the ‘Full English’. (We send all our midweek guests to the café to save staffing our own kitchen, as our midweek numbers are too low to open our own kitchens).

So you could either self-cater the breakfasts at (1) above for around £250, or send your guests down to the Country Park café.

So on this basis the net cost to you is £115 above, plus £250 = £365 for a 100 guest wedding, catered for with street food.

Or put another way, £3.65 cost per guest.

Not quite free then!  As I said, ‘almost free wedding’.

There is more potential profit on B&B and Bar if more people stay – up to 100 can be slept at the castle.

Whichever way you organise the breakfasts, you end up with virtually all the venue hire and catering cost covered by Bar use and B&B use.

Just add your Registrar’s cost, and all the suppliers, with more to splash out on these, as you have arranged your venue very cleverly indeed.

Only at Craig y Nos Castle.

How this works depends on how business-like and entrepreneurial you are.

The reason why this works so well, as an option, is because running the wedding as an entrepreneur in a business-like manner, you save on our payroll, PAYE, employers NIC and VAT, as you and your guests are doing all the ‘service aspect’ yourselves.

When we employ a team of staff, we have to cover all manner of extra costs to supply a full wedding service. We’ll supply you a wedding costing £10 - £15k, with everything done for you, but by the time we have covered all our costs, taxes, PAYE, NIC, VAT etc, our profit is truly negligible.

We make about the same as maybe £1390 of dry hire!

So we may as well just rent you the room and let you get on with it!

With this method of hiring out the venue, we can keep our expenses very low. The self catering and private bar options allow you to get the net cost of your wedding down to maybe 2% to 3% of the cost of having a full service wedding.

Not quite ‘free’, but a very sensible way of organising your wedding in a cost of living crisis.

It is a win-win for both us. As a venue as we rent out space that might otherwise not be used. It is a win for you as you save all the VAT, PAYE, Employers NIC, and payroll costs we’d have to pass on to you, on a full service wedding.