Last minute weddings…..
Whereas over the last few years, we’ve usually found couples enquiring about a string quartet for their wedding several years in advance, with 2009 a year of financial uncertainty for many people, it seems that there’s a real trend at the moment for couples to put off booking a wedding until a few weeks beforehand- leaving all the planning to the last minute.
Unless we’ve had a cancellation, the most popular dates such as Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays over the summer will often be already booked up, but like most string quartets, we have plenty of availability on weekdays. As many wedding venues offer a reduced price structure for weekday weddings (Mondays to Thursdays), this can be an excellent way of saving money and also having a good choice of wedding suppliers who are more likely to be free. Clients can start by checking our availability instantly on our diary page. Every time we get a provisional or confirmed booking, we put it onto the online diary straight away so that it’s easy to see at a glance whether we’re still free. We check emails and pick up voice mails- several times a day, so we’re able to get back to people usually within a few hours to discuss their needs and work out an exact quotation including any travel costs for the booking.
If the wedding really is last minute with musicians needed within a few days, it’s still quite possible to help out if we’re available - and we have organised a quartet for a wedding with literally three days notice, although for obvious reasons a string duo is more easy to co-ordinate, with only two players to book instead of four.
Really if a wedding is only a week or two away, we can’t offer our usual service of arranging special pieces by request, unless the sheet music can be easily brought in and delivered on time - but as our repertoire list is quite extensive, there should be something for everyone anyway (we hope!)
When time is of the essence, instead of posting out contracts and receiving deposits by cheque, when a booking is very urgent we normally exchange contracts by email and can receive payment of a deposit online or via paypal, so that the date is instantly confirmed. As a general policy, we don’t book any other musicians until we have something back in writing as it would be awful for players to turn down other work or organise a deputy for an orchestral commitment, only to find that the quartet booking didn’t go ahead after all.
Sadly, one other aspect of the financial crisis is the occasional cancellation of weddings and we have had 2-3 couples in the very unhappy situation of having booked everything up two years ago, but having to put wedding plans on hold due to unanticipated financial problems. If the wedding has been cancelled with over two months notice, we only keep the original £100 deposit as there is a good chance we can re-fill the date, but as with any wedding supplier, if a wedding is pulled at the very last minute, we do need to charge as we’ll all have turned down other work (and probably several other couples who would have booked us) on that date.
Fortunately with some last minute wedding bookings coming in, we are sometimes able to re-book a date that had been cancelled, in which case we do not ask for any further payments from the original couple - as we’ve been able to replace the lost work.
The other kind of last minute booking which we’ve always been asked for are those people who desperately wanted a string quartet for their weddings, but when they started planning, weren’t sure whether their budget could stretch to include live music. Occasionally people get in touch having realised they do have the money available after all, and wanting to book players about a month in advance - this is usually fairly striaghtforward as we have a pool of trusted players for each instrument and can arrange a group without many problems!
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