Booking and cancellation

Your date is booked once the booking fee is paid and the written agreement is signed. Until both are done it is only pencilled in, and someone else can take it.

The booking fee is $250 and comes off the total; the balance falls due four weeks before the ceremony. Once your date is booked I turn other couples away for it. By four weeks out the script is usually written and the notice lodged. What I keep pays for that work and for the bookings I said no to. Nothing here takes away your consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law. If the service is not delivered with due care and skill, those rights apply whatever this page says. No agreement can remove them.

You can move your date once at no charge, to any date I have free within eighteen months, and everything you have paid moves with it. A later date needs a new Notice of Intended Marriage, so it becomes a new booking.

If there is a death in your immediate family, a serious illness, or flood or fire closes the roads or the town, your booking fee moves to a new date and nothing else is charged. I have written this down because it happens here. The valley floods and the mountain roads close.

If I cannot be there, I refund everything you have paid, booking fee included. I will also find you another authorised celebrant and pass your paperwork to them so the wedding still goes ahead on your date. The Code of Practice for marriage celebrants requires this, so it is not up for negotiation.

I keep your notice and the documents lodged with it for the six years the Marriage Regulations require, and use them for nothing else. If the wedding does not go ahead, the notice lapses on its own.

Most celebrants in this region publish a booking fee and say nothing about cancelling, so couples only find out what happens when they need to cancel. I would rather you read it now, before you sign anything.

If anything here does not suit you, tell me while your date is still pencilled in and I am happy to talk it through.

The closer to the day you cancel, the more I keep, because that is when the cost to me goes up. Cancel early and someone else can still book the date. Cancel inside a fortnight and the script is already written, other couples have been turned away, and the date is very unlikely to fill again.

In that last window, if another booking does fill the date, you get back what it is worth. A flat amount kept no matter when you cancel would not match any real cost, and Australian consumer law looks hard at terms like that in a standard contract.