Colombo Court Blog The Hotel
A wedding or an event in Colombo, and what to ask before you book
Capacities, the monsoon question, what a venue should tell you upfront, and the case for a small wedding in a garden rather than a large one in a ballroom.
Colombo hosts large weddings very well, and some hotels here have ballrooms for eight hundred guests. This article is about smaller celebrations, and about the questions worth asking whatever size of event you are planning.
Ask for real capacities, in three numbers
If a venue gives you only one number, ask what it means. Ask for the seated dinner and the banquet capacity. These numbers are very different, and the seated figure is the one that matters most for your guests.
Here are ours as an example. The garden takes a hundred and twenty for a banquet. The rooftop seats sixty. The Scarlet Room takes twenty-five and is a fully equipped meeting room with a projector. The library seats eight.
Ask the monsoon question early
Any Colombo venue offering an outdoor evening event should explain this without being asked. What is the wet-weather plan, how long does it take to put in place, and who makes the decision?
A good answer names a specific indoor space and a specific time for the decision. A weak answer simply says the weather is usually fine. Rain in Colombo tends to fall in forty-minute bursts, so it is less of a concern than many people fear, but every venue should have a plan.
Ask who you will actually be dealing with
The person who sells you the venue is often not the person who manages your event on the day. Ask whether it will be the same person, and ask to meet them. At a small hotel it usually is, which is one of the main advantages of a smaller venue.
Ask about exclusive use
This question makes the difference between a hotel wedding and a wedding that happens to be in a hotel. Can you book the whole building? At a thirty-one-room property the answer can be yes, which means no other guests in the lift and no other event in the next room. At a hotel with two hundred rooms, that is rarely possible.
The case for small
An evening for a hundred and twenty guests in a garden, with a lit pool running through it, feels very different from an event for four hundred in a ballroom, and it often costs less per guest. The food is prepared by one kitchen rather than a large banqueting operation. Your photographs will have trees in them. And everyone can hear the speeches.
It also works well with Colombo traffic, because guests who are staying at the hotel arrive on time.
What to send us
Send us the date, the number of guests and the type of event. That is enough for us to tell you whether we are the right venue, and we will be honest if we are not. Send your enquiry through the form on our Plan an Event page, or email info@colombocourthotel.com.
