Any former/current brides who can weigh in on whether it would be a faux pas to (lightly) redline vendor agreements? Starting to plan my wedding and don’t want to piss off any of the vendors I aim to work with, but also want to make sure there are baseline protections. For context, this will be a destination wedding in Italy and I feel like the Italians are way more take it or leave it.

I did it for almost all of mine and nearly every vendor still messed something up. I got a decent amount of money back after. Fully recommend.

You can do it, but do it in a normal way not a lawyer way. Call them and talk to them about it, don’t blindside them with redlines. I negotiated a few things and had the opposite experience as the other commenter—all of my vendors went above and beyond.

Pardon the ignorance (not a contracts lawyer by far) but how would that even work for Italian vendors? Could you even enforce it if you’re not familiar with Italian law and protections for them? I almost think it’d be better to have a solid contract with a US based planner with expertise in Italian destination weddings and have them handle/take responsibility for the vendors. I imagine they’d want more $$$ for that extra risk though.

I redlined the heck out of my vendor agreements. One vendor didn’t respond after I sent it to them but that was probably for the best. Their contract was nonsensical and concerning.

My husband did this with our destination wedding contract. I thought for sure the global hotel chain was going to tell us to pound sand, but they accepted all our proposed edits.

Don’t you have a wedding planner coordinating all these things? I didn’t even really look at my vendor agreements. It was his domain.

I asked for changes to terms I didn’t like. But these were brought up by email or verbally. They were ok with it but this is not in Europe though

I don’t know that it’s a faux pas as much as it’s over the top. Destination weddings are challenging to begin with. They are a burden to your guests unless they all live in Italy?

If you can hire your planner in advance of signing your venue contract, I would highly recommend that, particularly if you are planning on hiring a planner who is local to the destination. I’m getting married in Mexico and have a Mexico-based planning team and it was very helpful to have them involved in contact negotiations, particularly when we had contracts that referenced Mexico law (which I do not know anything about).

At least for the east coast, it really depends on who owns the company/venue and how big/popular they are. For example, my venue is government owned and the caterer is exclusive to the venue, so no edits to those contracts but they were willing to clarify things in writing over email which was there way of saying you will get what you want, but this needs to stay as is... so relying on good faith. My photographer's contract was very sloppy but someone famous used them a few years ago, while they were not really budging much on terms, they did budge on price. If things are vague, get clarity in writing over email, so at least you have some level of comfort, even if its not exactly how a lawyer would like it. Also, some things in this industry are just standard, and unfortunately have to be accepted as is.

I review carefully and often markup all my contracts I receive from anyone I’m paying for a service. For example, I hired a photographer for my child’s birthday party that included a use of image license in the contract. We negotiated it and revised it to exclude images of minors from the license.