Why & How the Deal works - Wedding Venue Swansea | South Wales | Wales, Craig y Nos Castle wedding packages, wedding receptions

The Special Wedding Offer Deal (SWOD) is our most popular Wedding Package. It is best value if your guests need to stay the night, provided you have at least 50 guests wishing to stay over.

For smaller weddings, where there are fewer guests and / or fewer than 50 wishing to stay overnight, the regular tariff would apply. However the incentive created by the savings on larger numbers may encourage you to consider a larger wedding. Craig y Nos Castle is one of the larger wedding venues in South Wales and is ideally suited to larger wedding parties.

Up to and including 2009, we only offered our 'regular tariff'. This is shown on the next page and works out at £126.79 (2013) to £140.39 (2014) per head once you factor in the evening buffet, venue hire, welcome drinks and the wedding breakfast at full price. Regular tariff weddings were quite normal in 2007-8, before the current economic downturn. Weddings were larger, budgets were higher, and we would frequently see sums of £15,000 or more spent on a single wedding day, including all the accommodation and bar sales.

Given the Special Wedding Offer Tariff is around one third the cost of the regular tariff, you might ask, "how come we are able to offer such a good Deal?" Mainly it is in response to the current economic downturn. It is also to do with averages. Our Wedding Package discourages smaller weddings, in favour of minimum numbers. So while we earn less on larger weddings, our average income per wedding remains similar, because the smaller weddings are encouraged to scale up to get the discounts under the wedding package deals.

In 2010 we introduced a 'free wedding' deal where guests would pay £100 or so per head, to include DB&B, the dinner element paying for the wedding breakfast. This left the couple with nothing to pay for the wedding breakfast or the venue hire, if they had 50 guests or more. The 'free wedding' deal was popular, though couples sometimes found their guests were reluctant to pay the £95-£100 per head tariff, for dinner, bed and breakfast, to include the wedding breakfast.

A way around this was for the wedding couple to pay the food element only, then at £25 per head, with the wedding guest only paying the B&B element. This led to the Special Wedding Offer Deal, our main Wedding Package, as it stands now.

Probably two thirds of our weddings are now on the Special Wedding Package Deals. We discovered the income level to the castle was broadly similar despite the heavy discounting. This was because under the regular tariff, couples were in 2009 and 2010, reducing numbers from pre-recession levels of 80 - 90 down to 30's and 40's for the wedding breakfast, with a higher number invited only for the evening 'do'. As most of the evening guests tended not to turn up, our weddings were trending to very much smaller affairs than two years earlier.

So though the per head charge was higher, the castle was losing income due to lower numbers attending the wedding breakfast. With the recession our weddings were getting smaller.

Many guests invited for the 'evening only' didn't show up. We saw a pattern where wedding breakast numbers were reduced as a couple saved money and 'no-shows' for the evening caused a further reduction in guests. Couples were paying for an evening buffet for 'evening only' guests who did not turn up. This reduced our bar income, while food the couple had paid for went uneaten.

With the Wedding Package Deals we encourage couples to increase their numbers. With more guests staying overnight, and more guests overall, the income from bar sales increases. For example, you save (and so we lose) £3,256.85 (2012 & 2013) or £3,798.85 (2014) when you have the wedding breakfast but no evening buffet, for 50 guests.

You save a bit more, £3,514.35 (2012/13) to £4,144.35 (2014), when adding an evening buffet for your fifty guests, due to the discount on the buffet.

But we gain the guarantee of 50 X £75.00 on the B&B, as you have 50 guests staying over. This gives us an income of £3,750.00 on B&B. Pre-recession, we would have had this anyway, but B&B spend has been dropping post receossion, so the Wedding Package addresses this by asking you to get 50 guests staying overnight, in return for free venue hire. Once lots of guests are staying the night, there is no fear of drink drive, so we gain extra bar income from guests who can drink more, and drink later into the night because they are staying over. This really livens up the party and extends it. Wedding Couples find their Wedding continues late into the night, where before Brides and Grooms were finding the evening drawing prematurely to a close as their guests made their excuses and drove home.

So though the cost to you is about one third of the regular tariff (see following comparison pages) the Deal makes as much sense to us as it does to you, as the overall income per wedding, averaged out, remains much the same. Both our Wedding Packages encourage more weddings at higher numbers with more staying overnight.

We do however lose out where a large wedding party would have had higher numbers anyway, on full regular tariff, and where you and your guests would have used the accommodation anyway. Where once we would have made £15,000 to £20,000 on a large wedding at full tariff, we might now make only £10-11,000 overall, once the accommodation and guests bar spend is factored in.

The Wedding Package Deal is excellent value for higher numbers. Thanks to the recession and the need for us to offer good deals for the customer, your own spend goes a lot further now than it would have done four or five years ago.  

The Special Wedding Offer gives you a substantial saving. Where you might have downsized at full tariff, now you can afford the wedding of your dreams with ALL your guests attending for the whole day - at a fraction of the cost a couple of years back. There is no need to have a separate evening contingent (most won't show anyway); you can invite everyone you really want to your wedding day, for the whole day. You may as well make the most of having the castle wedding venue exclusively yours for the whole day!