Hayne House Q&A: Coronavirus and Your Wedding

Update from KCC:

“Following the Government’s announcement on 23 March, all ceremonies due to take place during the 3-week national lockdown period have been cancelled. We are also cancelling all notice of marriage and civil partnership appointments during the lockdown.

Where possible, our Ceremony Teams will be working from home and will be working through all email enquires as quickly as possible. We appreciate this is a very stressful time and hope to help all our customers as soon as possible.”

“Dear Customers RE: Marriage and Civil Partnership Ceremonies temporary changes in response to Coronavirus

You will be aware there has been a lot of focus on potential restrictions on numbers of people allowed to gather in one place. 

In the interest of our community, we are following Public Health England’s social distancing guidelines.

Due to these guidelines, we have taken the decision to limit the number of guests to two. It is legally possible to conduct a marriage ceremony with a minimum of 4 people in attendance (party 1 and party 2 and 2 witnesses) and, as a service we are committed to doing everything in our power to carry out your ceremony at your chosen time and venue.

We are temporarily restricting ceremonies to take place with just the minimum requirement of party 1 and party 2, 2 witnesses and a photographer. The law requires that your witnesses speak and understand English and that they are over 18 years old. This is only for the legal part of the ceremony if the venue is in agreement you can still continue with the reception. 

Unfortunately, during this unprecedented worldwide pandemic, you will appreciate we cannot be certain how events will unfold, or indeed what the Government advice and guidance will be at the time of your ceremony as it is updating on a daily basis

Please be assured we are doing everything in our power to conduct your ceremony on the day and time it is booked. However, you should prepare yourself for the risk that on the day of your ceremony arrangements may need to be flexible. You will understand this is because we cannot accurately predict the numbers of Registrars we will have available to deliver all the ceremonies across Kent as they themselves may need to self-isolate on a specific day.

Please be aware that in the most extreme circumstances, we may have to call you on the day of your ceremony to postpone it if the Government guidance changes overnight.

We appreciate that this may be extremely disappointing, but we remain committed to do everything we can to make your day special and memorable, whilst taking a responsible stance during this unprecedented public health crisis. Whatever the circumstances, we are committed to providing you the best possible service we can, subject to the prevailing conditions.

In view of the above, you may choose to postpone or re-arrange your ceremony. If you choose to do so, we ask that you contact the office at ……@kent.gov.uk. If you are getting married at an Approved Premise (hotel, country house, restaurant etc) you will need to contact them to arrange postponing your ceremony. 

If you choose to postpone your ceremony, there will be no additional charge for this if booked within the year of your original date of your ceremony.

If you do not wish to postpone your ceremony, you do not need to contact us to confirm this. We will be in contact if anything changes with regards to the restricted numbers for your ceremony to take place. 

We are also asking that if you, or anyone living with you in your home/ your guests has been advised by a doctor, health professional, NHS 111 or Public Health England to self-isolate at home because of Covid19 infection, please call us to postpone your ceremony or notice of marriage/civil partnership appointment. 

Thank you for your understanding at this difficult time. Kent Registration Service

For 2020 couples marrying in March to June the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak is having a major impact on how we operate and when we are able to host your wedding. At Hayne House, for your peace of mind, we are doing all we can to be proactive and secure a backup plan for you.

As a caring venue we are contacting each couple to discuss giving two alternative wedding dates if the original planned wedding was unable to go ahead due to the virus.  These two dates are back up plans and will only be ‘used’ should it be necessary to move the wedding.

We believe that postponing your wedding is something that you should seriously consider even if it means that you are stressed now and you might not love the dates available but waiting to find out if your wedding is going to go ahead, as the clock ticks down, we believe will prove to be more stressful. However to reassure you we are hoping as many weddings will go ahead on the original booked dates, albeit in more intimate circumstances.

One of your main considerations is the health of your guests booked to attend.  You may find that your guest numbers drop due to travel restrictions or elderly family members not feeling comfortable going to family gatherings at the moment.

We understand this is an extremely worrying time, but we still want you to have the day you imagined and that is important to us. We therefore recommend that you rally best men and ushers to take on filming the key parts of your day and streaming them live to your loved ones, perhaps by Facetime or other mobile app (please note that our internet is slow as we are so rural but we have excellent phone reception).

We also understand that every wedding is different and therefore they need to be looked at on a case by case basis. However, under these circumstances, it’s all about trying to be really flexible, practical and work together to make sure you have an amazing day, even if it is at a later date.

Hayne House will not be cancelling other weddings; rather we will be offering you two dates to provisionally hold for 7 days should your wedding not be able to go ahead. These dates will be midweek in later part of 2020 and some in the early part of next year once those dates have been exhausted.

As you are aware couples book their weddings around 18 to 24 months in advance so by postponing your wedding it will mean switching to another date. The day is likely to be off-peak as the majority of dates have gone for 2020 and peak dates in 2021 have already been held or booked. So, couples are having to compromise on seasons and days of the week due to the extremely limited availability of dates, but at Hayne House we are endeavouring to rehouse every single one of our couples we just need you to be patient as we work our way through dates and options.

The first point of call if you need to postpone your wedding to a later date is to contact your insurance company and have a conversation with them about your options so that you can make the best and most well-informed decision as we are unable to advise you on this matter.

After choosing one of your two proposed dates with us you need to contact all of your suppliers, don’t worry about our Handpicked suppliers whom we have already liaised with on your behalf  (caterers, DJ and chair dressings), to find out if they are prepared to postpone and that hopefully, your rescheduled wedding date works for them. If it doesn’t and you are forced to cancel a supplier – check with your insurance company again before taking any action.

As we have explained we are prioritising those immediately affected namely March, April, May and June weddings. If you wish to postpone your wedding regardless then please contact us and we will endeavour to offer you two provisional dates to choose from as soon as we can, but these will be allocated to you and are likely to be a midweek.

We are currently enabling couples that are immediately affected in April to June to reschedule their wedding date to one of our two provisional dates without incurring any additional costs.

There are a number of factors that are slowing the process down.

Availability When you consider, probably just like yourselves, that couples tend to book around 18 to 24 months in advance. The first hurdle is that we have already taken a lot of weddings in 2021 and the majority are on the key weekend dates as couples book these furthest in advance to ensure they get a summer wedding.

Handpicked suppliers We are working closely with our Caterers Touchays and Scott Andersons (who have both been amazing), to ensure that they are available on the same dates so there is a massive amount of juggling going on adding lots of pressure to see this through as a business.

Please note that once we have secured your back up date we will not be able to offer you alternative back up dates further down the line, as the date availability is reducing on a daily basis given the scale of the situation. We kindly ask that once you have agreed to your back up date and once we have made arrangements for ourselves and your suppliers for this back up date, that you please keep to it.

You will hopefully understand that we have been working around the clock prioritising March, April and May 2020 couples. We are working through every wedding date one by one in chronological order to try to ensure that we have available dates to host weddings.

By offering all our couples a postponement alternative date, this will ensure that couples have time to discuss options with their suppliers and do not lose out on any supplier deposits or payments, therefore minimising couples’ potential financial losses.

We understand that this is not easy for any of our couples. But, we are working as hard as we can to make sure that every couple directly affected over the next few months can have a backup plan and should this continue into June and July we will support you in finding a suitable date together.

At the moment our immediate priority is the weddings coming up imminently as we are actively putting in place alternative back updates for them should this need arise, which is extremely challenging as we have such limited dates available. Like all wedding venues, most of our 2020 and 2021 dates are now fully booked so we have therefore secured dates for our immediate upcoming weddings throughout Autumn & Winter 2020 where the Handpicked suppliers are available.

We are continuing to juggle couples’ weddings to try to give them the best dates we possibly can, that not only work for them but also their caterer and us. But, at this stage of the year, as we go into what would normally be our peak season, dates are limited.