Just a general tip, but I found it quite hard pricing up venues until I drew up a spreadsheet; I have a separate sheet for each venue we've looked at, and in this I've included things like room hire, ceremony costs, registrar's fees, wedding package prices, or, if they don't do packages, cost of the wedding breakfast, wine, champagne toast, evening buffet, cost of DJ, flowers, photography etc. Because some venues include things like chair covers, sashes, flowers, DJ, buffet etc, they can at first glance look expensive, but when you start pricing up others they actually come out pretty cheap. It sets everything out in black and white so you can see exactly what you're getting for your money, and can easily compare it to another venue.

Having looked at a fair few venues in the Berks/Bucks/London area, most are coming out at similar prices, of around £100 pp for a basic package (canapes, welcome drink, 3 course breakfast, 1/2 bottle wine, champagne toast) and around £15 pp for the evening buffet. We're having a small wedding (43 day-time guests; 90 evening guests), and most are costing out at approx £8-10k for the venue hire, ceremony, food, drinks, and money behind the bar. As you're looking at 200 guests, personally I'd say that about £20k would be cheap, and anything under £25k reasonable. But obv I don't know the venue and how much they charge; some venues I've looked at charge £200 pp for a package...

I'm paying £56 per head as I get 20% off but it is usually £70 per head then its £15 per person for the evening buffet. Are you sure that you need 200 people there? Not being funny but how often do you see these people and how close are they to you? The reason I'm saying this is because do you really want to pay them kind of prices for each person if you only ever see them once in a blue moon or you don't like them? We cut our list down no end by inviting only people we have seen in the last year or those that we like and it saved us ££££££££ and also means that it is more personal to us. You could always have more people on the evening so those that you hardly see just come on the night time when it doesn't cost you so much to have them there. I personally wouldn't pay out that much just to have people I work with there etc unless they are personal friends.

I was thinking that 200 sounded a little excessive too Jo!

The venue might not have chair covers, so may not be able to negotiate them into it, I'd try negotiating a discount instead if I was you x

My venue will not budge on anything they know they have a fabulous location and seem to think they can charge what they want..

claire: are you getting buffet as well for that cost? Def agree with the others that you can haggle, as it's a very large wedding so their income will be way higher than normal on profit from the buffet and wedding breakfast alone, let alone the money that will be spent behind the bar. Some won't budge, but I've found in most cases there is some room for negotiation so it's worth a try.

Barbie86 - I love your idea of using a spread sheet! I have loads of diff emails from venues with prices annoying having to faff between them, would be handy to put them all in one place to compare!