ABWB Wedding Manifesto

There was huge support on Tuesday for Natalie Lovatt's letter for The Rt Hon Robert Buckland QC, requested by the MP himself to help set out the need for tailored financial support. Many thanks to so many of you for signing it.

That was quickly followed by the ABWB's manifesto setting out suggestions for Survival and Revival of the industry. 

We remain committed to getting financial support for those most significantly impacted by the restrictions on weddings in the short term, including company directors and others who have received no support at all. 

 

For us to be able to run safe events in 2021, involving larger numbers, we need to find the solutions and agree the roadmap now. We need the opportunity to run pilot events to give couples the confidence in larger events being possible to stem the flow of cancellations and postponements. We need to know the direction the government would like us to take so that we can develop the right systems and software to support venues in doing so.

 

All hospitality venues should, by law, be displaying the NHS App QR code in addition to contact tracing software such as Trusted Trace to protect your staff and reputation as well as complying with regulations.

 

We're working hard with others on an wedding industry standard and we'd be pleased to receive any feedback on the Wedding Safe prototype. Our aim is to develop a system to highlight the venues and suppliers capable of carrying out safe weddings under covid guidelines. In the meantime the website can be used as a useful resource for up to date government guidance.

 

We were pleased to see that The Knot, which incorporates WeddingWire (India, USA, Canada) as well as Hitched (UK) and Bodas (Spain) had published a Covid Weddings study. Disappointingly, for a company so huge, it only incorporates 10,000 couples worldwide and is just 4 pages of statistics almost entirely focusing on the USA. You can read it here.

 

For statistics relevant specifically to wedding venues in the UK, to help you make decisions on cash flow and marketing, it may be more helpful to look at our data for the past 3 months which can be read here.