As many of you have emailed, enquired, Facebooked us and more might have wondered, what actually goes on behind the scenes on a day to day basis at Bali Brides HQ? Why do we sometimes answer right away and other times it might take a few days? And why some weeks we’re so flat out it might take us a week to answer your simple questions.
Well, let us give you a little sneaky look into the crazy busy behind the scenes of a normal week at Bali Brides and what we do on a daily basis!
Emails – Daily we receive minimum of 20 emails from clients, vendors, new enquiries. All client emails and enquires are received by Tristan and then given to a team member or replied to personally, no templates – she reads and responds to each one! Another member of our team is in charge of following up with all vendors, hotels and more to confirm rates, get photos, quotes etc.
With 23 weddings upcoming this year and many new enquires you can imagine we spend about 90% of our time in front of the computer replying to emails!
Social media – Besides emails we also get countless enquiries from social media platforms – Our Facebook page, Instagram, as well as the messages we get on our personal Facebook pages from clients.
Keeping track of the above – Imagine getting Facebook messages on your personal page about weddings, other questions on your business page, Instagram enquiries and emails and then getting to the office in the morning and trying to remember who asked what and where!
Quotes – Daily we are sending out new quotes to clients or amending ones we have in the works. Sometimes we have to seek rates from other companies for new pricing or for rates for different packages.
Finding new vendors and suppliers – We have over 100 venues on our books for weddings, that’s right 100! It’s a lot, on top of the existing contacts we have we are also always on the lookout for new venues, florists, caterers, photographers and more, we source them and have to get pricing and packages for you all.
Bookings – Once you confirm your wedding venue, suppliers, photography and more we then arrange to book them in as well as get invoices so we can pay everyone for you to avoid all the international transfer fees.
Follow-ups – If you have ever tried to get information in Bali you will notice sometimes you don’t get a reply for a VERY LONG TIME! This also happens to us and as much as we appreciate “Bali Time”, sometimes it can take us a week or longer with daily calls and emails to get replies from some companies. We then need to forward the relevant information to our lovely clients!
Client site visits – A lot of our clients visit us to view venues and all the fun wedding stuff, when this happens we are out of the office all day focusing on them, doing food, cake tastings, visiting venues.
Site meetings – Once a venue is booked in for a client if we haven’t already been there before we often have to go visit the venue, meet the staff and sometimes take our suppliers to measure areas for decoration, lighting etc in preparation for the big day! We also visit suppliers we rent items off to make sure that their furniture and props are good quality, clean and not damaged.
Accounting, books and banking – Don’t even get me started on this! Some places quote in IDR some in USD, some want 30% deposits, some offer discounts to us for certain items at certain times of the year, monthly specials, letting our clients pay us to our Australian account, getting the money converted to applicable currency for payment to pay everyone. Very time-consuming!
Embassy visits / Pre-wedding – When you arrive in Bali for your wedding we meet you a few days prior to your big day to confirm all details as well as do the embassy visit for anyone doing a legal wedding.
Run sheets – We have to come up with the time table for the wedding day, advise all vendors what times they need to be where and make sure everyone knows the schedule.
Wedding day – On the wedding day, we get into the office nice and early, print everything, reconfirm with all vendors’ arrival times and head out to the venue. If it’s a resort, hotel or restaurant we arrive 2 hours before the ceremony to oversee setup. If it’s a villa wedding, we are normally onsite at 9AM. We are there until the end to make sure your day is perfect and everything runs smoothly!
So with peak wedding season coming in, countless site visits and weddings approaching if we haven’t replied to you within 48 hours, we have not forgotten, sometimes we are just prioritizing our upcoming wedding clients or we are out of the office and will be back on track as soon as we have some time to get through all our messages and emails and have been able to follow up on the things you are asking for.
For any enquiries or questions feel free to touch base with our amazing team at Bali Brides wedding planning.