For richer for poorer: the high cost of weddings

A trend towards increasingly lavish celebrations has made couples easy targets for greedy wedding suppliers, writes Caroline Madden

WEDDING RECEPTION? €15,000. Designer wedding dress? €2,000. Music? €3,000. Photographer? €2,000. Flowers? €2,000. Bridal party outfits and gifts? €1,000. Miscellaneous "essentials" (ie chocolate fountains, ice sculptures, fireworks, red carpet, giant profiterole cakes)? €5,000. Creating perfect wedding-day memories? Priceless.

A heady mix of easy money and a trend towards increasingly lavish nuptial celebrations in recent years has made brides and grooms-to-be easy targets for avaricious suppliers in the wedding industry.

Aware that couples had few qualms - until the recent downturn at least - about blowing their budget if it meant achieving the wedding of their dreams, suppliers sneaked in a variety of sharp practices that border on profiteering.

One of the most blatantly unfair practices is that suppliers, whether florists, bakers, photographers or musicians, instantly increase their prices as soon as they hear the "w" word.

While some suppliers may have a valid argument that the service they provide for a wedding is more elaborate or time-consuming than for other events, in most cases the premium is unjustifiable.

A series of spot checks carried out for this article found that consumers can expect to face an average "wedding premium" of 50 per cent when ordering goods and services for the big day, and in many cases it can be significantly higher.

Take car hire, for example. To hire a Rolls Royce or a Bentley for a wedding can cost between €450 and €600, compared to between €250 and €340 for a birthday celebration.

Apart from decking the car out with ribbons, the service is identical (although providers may argue that they spend longer cleaning the car for weddings - but surely it should be clean for all customers?). In fact, there is an argument to be made that providing a hire car for weddings is considerably easier than for other events such as birthdays, hen nights and debs, where the potential to have drunk, rowdy and sick customers is much higher.

The same applies to wedding cakes. A traditional two-tiered cake can cost, in some instances, 60 per cent more if you let slip that it is for a wedding.

One supplier quoted €180 to provide a cake for a party and upped their price to €290 when a quote for a similar wedding cake was requested.

And when it comes to hiring a DJ to entertain your guests, the same unreasonable price hikes are par for the course.

Suppliers contacted as part of this exercise quoted prices of €350-€450 for providing a DJ for four hours at a birthday party. But if the DJ was required for a wedding reception (for the same three or four hours), the quotes shot up to between €425 and €650. True, the DJ will churn out those wedding staples like Rock the Boat and Amarillo, but does this dubious service justify an additional charge of up to €200?

According to the National Consumer Agency, while the practice of applying a premium for the same service is not illegal, it is frowned upon.

Consumers are advised not only to shop around, but to inform suppliers why they are taking their custom elsewhere if they encounter this practice.

As any videographer will tell you, there's no point spending upwards of €30,000 on your wedding and not getting it professionally and artistically captured for posterity. However, according to one videographer, an element of pricefixing exists among some of his competitors.

"It's kind of a little cosy cartel that some guys have," he says. For example, some videographers may both agree to charge €1,200, he says, rather than undercut each other.

Any consumers who have encountered pricefixing should contact the Competition Authority with their complaint.

Most brides-to-be have cottoned on to the fact that Irish bridal boutiques charge a huge mark-up on dresses that can be bought for a fraction of the price online.

In a post on one bridal chatroom, a woman reported that she found her dream dress online for $729 (€465) including shipping, and was quoted the equivalent of $2,149 (€1,370) for the same dress in an Irish boutique. Even after customs duty is factored in, this margin is astounding.

Not surprisingly, it is now common practice for women to try on dresses in boutiques here and then cut out the "middle man" by ordering them over the internet.

However, several brides-to-be on the discussion board of the popular weddingsonline.ie bridal site were thrown into a state of panic earlier this year when they discovered that, as of April 1st last, Maggie Sottero dresses could no longer be ordered by individuals in Ireland.

These gowns are particularly popular with Irish brides as the inbuilt corsetry can make the wearer look a size smaller. Unfortunately, brides will now have to pay considerably more to achieve that enviably cinched-in waist, as - short of getting an American friend or relative to order the dress for them and ship it over - they will have little choice but to buy it through an Irish retailer.

"I'm worried now that, if I can't get it on the internet, it'll be beyond my budget," one distressed Irish bride-to-be posted on the site last month on the subject of her dream Maggie Sottero dress.

Perhaps the sector that has benefited most from increasingly lavish nuptial celebrations is the hotel industry, where everything from a choice of main course to using the hotel's knife to cut the cake merits an extra charge.

Couples who try to keep costs down by supplying their own alcohol to the venue have found that this doesn't necessarily work out any cheaper.

The Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, for example, applies astounding corkage charges of €25 and €40 respectively for each bottle of wine and champagne supplied by the customer.

If the couple wish to keep the party going until dawn (or at least until 2am), they will most likely have to pay for a bar extension.

According to the Shelbourne, there are considerable costs involved in obtaining an extension and these are passed on to the customer in the form of a €450 charge. Interestingly, Bunratty Castle is able to provide a bar extension for €275.

According to wedding industry insiders, couples are beginning to tighten the belt when it comes to their big-day budget, so the boom times could be over for many suppliers in the market, not least hotels.

"Hotels are . . . beginning to feel the pressure, with bridal couples demanding more 'bang for their buck'," says Colette O'Loughlin, director and editor of simplyweddings.com.

"Some would argue 'it's about time - didn't they have it their own way long enough?', and possibly there is some truth in that, but everyone is in business to make money."