Visiting Our Wedding Venues in Sorrento, Italy

If you followed my Instagram Stories last week, you were privy to a whole lot of pictures of me stuffing my face with pasta and pizza, you lucky thing. I also posted some glorious Italian scenery shots, which I’ll now spend the next month or so milking.

Tom and I were in Sorrento viewing our wedding venues, in preparation for our big day there next year. How exciting!

In typical Dannielle Lily fashion, I’ve relied almost exclusively on gut feelings instead of following any logical route for planning our wedding. I suppose you could say I’ve gone arse about face with the whole thing.

We booked and *shock horror* paid our deposit having never seen our venues. It’s probably quite normal for couples who choose to have a destination wedding, but it has caused me a lot of worry.

We had never even been to Sorrento but I just knew, when my destination wedding venue hunt led me to that gorgeous little town in Campania, that it was our place. 

And fortunately, our short visit this past weekend proved to us that it absolutely is heaven on earth. We fell in love with Sorrento and can’t wait to go back this time next year, with our extended families in tow.

Unfortunately though, fate seems to have other plans for us – which came to light only when we got home from the trip. I’ll explain all nearer the end of this post. Let’s concentrate on the happy bits first, eh?

A few reasons to visit your destination wedding venue before the big day

Sussing out the journey

We’re keen to keep travel times as short as possible because we’re asking a lot of people to go all that way for our wedding as it is, so we had a little panic because our journey from Naples Airport to Sorrento took almost four hours. I had read online that it’s supposed to take less than 1.5 on the bus, so I was worried that our guests would be annoyed about such an unexpectedly long transfer. I later learned that we had chosen to arrive on a national holiday and that’s why the roads were crazy. Lesson learned: check the wedding date doesn’t overlap with Italy’s national day! Our long journey was just down to bad planning on our part and it shouldn’t be an issue when our wedding guests do the same trip.

Construction fears

I was scrolling through Facebook a few weeks back and saw pictures that almost brought my heart into my mouth: the place where we had booked our ceremony was being renovated! They hadn’t communicated this to any of the brides and there were a lot of angry people in a Facebook group I’d joined for advice about weddings in the area. Second lesson learned: always enquire about whether there are any construction plans that might affect how your wedding looks before you book the venue!

Thankfully, I saw the venue with my own eyes and the renovation is now pretty much complete. I thought it was an improvement so I’m happy with that. It was actually quite emotional, standing in the spot where we’ll say our vows next year! 

Getting the sizes right

The day we went to see our reception venue, I had a slight hangover (again, typical Dannielle fashion) so it curbed my excitement a tiny bit. The venue turned out to be much more spacious in real life than it looked in pictures, so that was a happy surprise. I had read in online reviews that the pictures don’t do the venue justice but it made me feel better to see it with my own eyes.  It also made me wonder if we should invite more guests! 

Making local friends

One unexpected advantage gained from doing a pre-wedding trip to Sorrento was that we gleaned local insight we might not have got online. We got chatting to a local barman who had just been to an event at our reception venue and he assured us the food was amazing, so that put my mind at ease. I’ve missed out on things like menu tastings because our wedding is abroad! The barman also gave us his number and said to get in touch if we needed anything. I hope he’s ready for our rabble of wedding guests to descend on his bar next year!

Contingency plans

We decided to view a back-up reception venue the day before we went to see the one we had actually booked. It was nice but not as nice as ours, so I’m 100% certain we’ve picked the best option for us. And if anything goes wrong with our own choice, at least we’ll know where to call. It’s always useful to have a safety net, right?

Unfortunately for us, it turned out to be the ceremony venue we needed to worry about.

Shop the look

And then it all went wrong

The bad news came the day after we got back from our trip. I got an email from the wedding planner and opened it with a big smile on my face because I was told our date would be confirmed at the end of April. The smile quickly faded as my eyes scanned the text. We hadn’t got our venues. The ceremony venue was overbooked, and they had got us a slot at another venue.

I was absolutely seething. When we paid our deposit months ago, we were told we would have to wait for the ceremony venue to confirm our date and time, and that in the unlikely event that we didn’t get our first choice of date, they would book us in on our second date of choice. It was never, ever stipulated to us that we may not get the venue we had booked. The reason I opted to use a destination wedding planning agency was to take the stress out of securing both venues on our chosen date, so I’m massively disappointed that they took a deposit from us knowing they may not have been able to ensure we got the venues we were paying for. I looked at the back-up venue they had taken the liberty of booking for us as a consolation prize, and I hate it.

I’m now going back and forth with our agency trying to secure our venues on any available date, but if they don’t manage to get everything fixed I’ll be seeking a full refund on our deposit (and sharing the whole honest experience online, with the name of the company included). I don’t have the mental energy to start the whole venue hunt again and it’s especially disappointing because we’ve spent months planning and visualising our wedding in the venues we booked. I’m also really shocked because the agency knew we were in Sorrento just days before they dropped this bomb, and that would have been a great time to inform us of this problem.

All I can do is wait at the moment and keep my fingers crossed. I feel a bit ashamed for being so upset about all of this because I know there are bigger issues across the world, but I’m still absolutely gutted. Keep your fingers crossed for us, please!

We managed to tie wedding venue viewings in with exploring Sorrento so I’ll share some blog posts soon about the destination itself. I figure I can add even more information to them next year, when we will be in Italy for almost two weeks and most likely visiting a few places in the surrounding area. If all goes to plan, that is…