Picture this – So after three or four years of dating, awesome romantic dinners and surprise birthday parties, he finally puts a ring on it. You are excited; it’s time to dust out that scrap book you put together since you were 15. You have this perfect picture of how the D-day is supposed to play out. Suddenly it occurs to you that the execution is not going as smoothly as you envisaged.
There’s a multitude of appointments you have to meet, your designer has booked you down for several fittings, you have to choose a caterer, attend several cake tastings, there ar marriage classes you cannot afford to miss, not to mention all the potential in-laws you both have to introduce yourselves to and that is not the half of it. You’ve got work and multitude of deadlines to meet and in the midst of this you have to pick a venue.
So here’s what you have to consider;
- The venue has to fit the 600 guests you have invited.
- It has to have adequate parking and to some extent, safety assurance.
- You want a projector screen because you have to treat your guests to all the pictures you guys had taken from the first day he asked you out.
- You the venue to offer value added services like a green room because you just can’t go all sweaty from the car to the reception venue, you also need them to provide cooling facilities because it’s easier to control and generally convenient for all.
- Let’s not forget that it has to be within your budget.
But here’s the main problem. Your city has over 500 wedding locations, where do you even begin to start filtering them out? How many days and how much time do you have to visit all 500 of them? Or another problem scenario – you know and have been to a couple of events at some venues that quite meets some or all of the checklists above – but you’re not sure if they are available for your date.
Enter VenueHero – VenueHero launched a few days ago and they hope to take away the stress of looking for venues – especially for two categories of people:
- Those that already know good venues but need a quick way to confirm availability, book and pay for them and
- Those who live outside the cities they intend to have an event and trust VenueHero’s judgement to recommend great venues in those cities.
So say goodbye to long queues at the bank because not only can you search for a perfect venue from the comfort of your bedroom or office, but you can also confirm its availability, the services they offer and then go ahead to pay for it.
The startup which has offices in Lagos and Port Harcourt has Uche Aniche (Havilah & Hills, 1Suite.com.ng and Biztorials.com Founder) as its founder. We connected a few weeks ago and he had me test the functionality of the platform.
I must say I was quite impressed. For every transaction I made on the platform, I got instant notifications via email, so i knew when my venue was booked and I got a separate notification for my payments as well and I can keep tabs on my transaction history.
What also struck me was the ease of use (interactivity), simplistic appearance and clutter free interface. I can just picture this as mobile app on a lot of event planners’ mobile devices.
Kudos to Uche and the VenueHero team, the sky is your beginning.
Image credit: VenueHero
