Here's where the new search tool from The Wedding Calendar can help make planning your wedding a more pleasurable experience. Neil de Villiers, founder of The
Wedding Calendar, explains exactly how the novel tool works and what couples and suppliers can look forward to.
To begin, can you share how you previous experience has led you to set up The Wedding Calendar?
As Managing Director of Blue
Square Deals, we had provided deal platforms for some wedding related companies
(this is where companies can list products and services at discounted rates) on
their own websites. When these did not perform as well as we had anticipated, I
started to speak to some experts in the wedding industry to ask for their
advice on the subject.
One of my examples, during these
discussions, was of a venue that perhaps had a recent cancellation. The
suggestion was that, when a venue has cancellations, they don’t have many ways
to advertise availability, especially not at late notice.
Without exception, everyone I
spoke to agreed that this was indeed a big problem. Some even suggested that if
there was a way for venues, and indeed any other wedding related service
providers, to advertise their availability in a way that was easily accessible,
then this would be fantastic and they would promote this to their contacts and
members.
The challenge to provide this
type of solution was not an easy one. We spoke to as many service providers and
venues we could to gain an understanding of how they worked, how they found now
customers, and more importantly, how their customers usually found them.
Finally we discovered a way to
provide a real solution to this that we knew would work. In fact, the end
result is far more exciting than we even imagined at the beginning.
In your own words, what are the
key advantages for suppliers of enlisting their business into your new
directory?
The simplest way to describe The
Wedding Calendar is to see it as an availability listing of venues and wedding
services. This is where these venues and suppliers will list what they do,
where they do it, and most importantly, when they are available for hire.
This means that couples and
wedding planners can very quickly find venues and services that are available
on the date of their choice. In fact, we believe that instead of taking weeks
to find available services for their wedding, couples (and wedding planners)
will now be able to do the same tasks within minutes. Due to this convenience
factor that The Wedding Calendar will now bring to the industry, this is set to
become the wedding planning tool of choice over the next year or two.
Can you explain how the calendar
feature works?
The Calendar element of the website
is the most powerful part, because it provides a very simple way to find venues
or services on the date of your choice, very quickly. Using a range of filters for each category and tag, couples can see immediately the listings available within their date range (eg. a list of entertainment options available from March- May 2016).
In addition, a selection of different displays is available - you can select a day, month or a posterboard listing (which is what we show by default
on our calendar) or a basic list, according to personal preference.
Clicking on any listing, regardless
of view, will take you to the details of that service, where all the
information and contact details are available, including links to other websites,
review sites, etc. This means that as soon as you
have identified that someone is available, you can contact them and reserve
them immediately for that date.
If you want to tell someone
about it, then you can easily share it (sometimes family members are drafted in
to help find services, etc.) using email, Twitter, Facebook or
Google+.
On 21st January 2016
you launched the Wedding Calendar through a lavish event at
Donnington Manor Hotel. What were some of the highlights of the day?
The day was more than I had
expected, and everyone that attended left with a thorough understanding of
exactly how it all worked, as well as all the features.
We started with Bradley Osborne,
an accomplished guitarist who had previously been signed for the Columbia
record label as part of an Indie band, who entertained us with a number of
cover versions of current pop songs.
Guest speaker, Matt Evans
(photographer - regional runner-up in the Wedding Industry Awards 2015)
addressed the audience with his own (often humorous) experiences of
cancellations, lost bookings and the continual challenge of finding new
couples. Sarah Dillingham (Wedding Dress Sample Sale website and recent bride)
followed on with personal experiences of her trials and tribulations of trying
to book wedding services from a distance (she lives in London, but got married
in Bristol)
These two speakers brought home
the difficulties both sides of the wedding ‘fence’ experience in a very real
way that the audience could easily relate to. This sparked a fantastic Q&A
discussion the possibilities of how The Wedding Calendar could and would be
used by couples planning their weddings, as well as professional wedding
planners, expanding significantly on our initial expectations of the benefits.
As a directory service, how does the Wedding Calendar fit within
the industry? What unique features does it offer suppliers and clients?
Each member of The Wedding
Calendar will have their own private calendar to maintain. This is where they
will update their availability as and when it changes. The power of The Wedding
Calendar is how these individual calendars then all feed into the central
calendar, and it is the central, combined calendar that is presented on our
main website.
While the complete central
calendar is displayed on our website, each member can very easily display their
own private calendar on their own website too. The benefit of this is that they
can show their own availability on their own website, and these dates will match The Wedding Calendar main site. Automatically,
their availability is shown in two places -- great for marketing!
Additionally, we are able to
show a filtered listing of services and make that available to be placed on any
other website. For example, we are able to filter our central calendar to show
all venues and services in Cornwall, Summerset and Devon, and make this
available to be placed on the West Weddings website. People coming to your
website would then be able to find available services and venues in those
counties directly from your own website, but services from other regions would
not show.
Another very interesting feature
that The Wedding Calendar introduces is the ability to ‘subscribe’ to a
calendar. When you ‘subscribe’, you effectively add the calendar to your own
calendar application, such as a Google, Outlook, or Apple Calendar. This means that services and
venues can subscribe to their own calendars, and have a convenient listing
immediately available, even on their smartphone.
What this means for wedding planners is even more unbelievable. As we know, every wedding planner will naturally
have their list of preferred suppliers and venues. They will now be able to
subscribe to the private calendars of these members individually, and
immediately have their availability to hand, right on their own computer or
smartphone, without even needing to visit any website and without even phoning
their suppliers -- imagine that!
How does your service enable brides and grooms
to have a stress-free planning experience?
While I don’t believe that there is such as a
thing as a 100% stress-free wedding planning experience, The Wedding Calendar
will certainly reduce the number of hours spent searching for venues and
services that are available on the date of your choice.
One of the biggest stresses involved in
planning weddings is the endless phone calls to lists of possible suppliers
until you find someone who is actually available when you need them.
A simple, two minute search on The Wedding
Calendar will quickly identify who is available, leaving you with a far easier
task of selecting your preferred choice from the list of available suppliers,
rather than settling for the only one you have been able to find in hours of
phone calls.
Looking ahead, how do you
envisage your service developing over the coming years? Have thought of ways to expand your list of suppliers?
A common philosophy of marketing
is to spread the word down many different avenues. This is just as true for The
Wedding Calendar. The ability to place calendars
onto various websites, whether it is the full calendar or a filtered version,
means that it is possible to become embedded into The Wedding Industry very
quickly.
I am so excited with the
possibility of being able to make a very real impact on reducing the overall
stress levels of the wedding industry over the coming years.
To help people involved in the
wedding industry level out their streams of revenue, we have
started a reward program, where we (financially) thank those members who spread
the word about The Wedding Calendar on a continual basis. If we are worthy of
speaking about, and are doing a good job for the existing members, it is likely
that they would want to tell other people about it too. It is for this reason
that we encourage our members to join our reward program too.
Contact
The Wedding Calendar
W: http://weddingcalendar.co.uk/
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