[the bride says] Danielle | Attending Bridal Shows

Hi Event Crashers.  A special thank you to Steph for following my wedding planning.  I hope her readers can learn a little bit from my experiences and use them during your own planning.

January and February are all about one thing when it comes to wedding planning: Bridal Shows.  This month I went to two of them back to back. I felt extremely different at both.

The first one I went to was in York, PA.  Wedding Wonderland is what it was called.  Steph and I got there with about an hour left or so but that was seriously enough time!  When I walked in I signed in and got my sticker that said “B” for bride and then we headed into this BIG room filled with dozens of companies.  We were bombarded right when we walked in.  I didn’t really like that but it was David’s Bridal and well I have been slacking on making an wedding dress appointment so it actually helped!  For the rest of the time though we just walked around, stopped at the places we were interested in, put my name in for wedding prizes and then waited for the prize winners to be announced for the big prizes. {I didn’t win any of those.}
Here are some things I really liked about this place:
- It was all in one room.
- I could just go to their booth and sign up for the prize and take the information to look at it later.
- I didn’t have to be there forever to get everything I needed.
- There were a lot of great vendors there.  {Seriously, all of the people I am looking to help me with my wedding were from this bridal show}
- All of the vendors were from York County.
- This one was free.

The second bridal show I went to was in Lancaster, PA. This one was called Premier Bridal Event.  I got there right when it opened.  I had to pay 25 dollars for a swag bag that did have some useful information and free things in it but I will probably only use one of them.  This Bridal Show was split up into different rooms.  I think it was set up by seasons?  I’m not really sure.  I was really confused on where to go at first.  I seriously thought there were only two rooms when I was first looking around but then found more.

This bridal show was packed!  You could hardly move around.  Instead of each vendor having their own giveaways they had games you had to play and once you played those games you got “dollars”.  You could then use those dollars at the end of the show to bid on what would’ve been the vendors giveaways.  I didn’t really understand the point of the “games” and the “bidding”.  I guess it was to keep people there all day instead of just coming, doing what they need to do and then leave.  Lets be honest though, who really has all that time?  The show started at 10am and the bidding was at like 3pm.

I guess I could’ve left and came back but after all the frustration of walking around in tight spaces, entering and exiting a bunch of rooms and people bombarding me left and right to introduce themselves I didn’t really feel comfortable anymore!  Another thing I didn’t like was that the vendors were from A WIDE selection of places.  Pretty much throughout the whole Susquehanna Valley and lets be honest the further a place is from your wedding you know you are going to be paying a fortune for delivery.  As you can see I definitely didn’t like a lot from this bridal show.

I definitely agree that Bridal Shows are part of the wedding experience.  You get A LOT of good contacts to plan your wedding.  They can be fun.  You don’t need to go all day.  Depending your personality I’m sure you would probably like the second one more than the first one so I would definitely advise doing some research on the different bridal shows before picking the ones that you want to go to.  I honestly don’t really like talking to a bunch of people about something I don’t really know a lot about, which is why the second bridal show wasn’t really my type of tea.  Another thing you can do before you go to the show is look up what vendors are going to be there.  See if there are any in your price range that you are actually going to like!  If not don’t waste your time!

Questions: Have you ever been to a bridal show? What did you think?