Wedding Business Solutions

Tom Chelednik - The Knot 2025 Real Weddings Study

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Tom Chelednik - The Knot 2025 Real Weddings Study

What would your business look like if you froze it for two years—would you still be thriving, or would your unchanged methods leave you behind as couples’ expectations shift? Are you adapting fast enough to connect with today’s couples and am I missing out on leads by not updating my website or response process? Find out how shifts in the economy, generational preferences, and wedding planning technology are impacting booking trends—and what you should do about it before it’s too late.

Listen to this new episode for actionable insights on meeting Gen Z’s desire for personalization, improving your digital presence, and staying ahead of wedding business trends.

About Tom: 
Tom Chelednik has over 25 years of sales and marketing experience, including 17 in the wedding industry. From 2008 to 2020, he held leadership roles at The Knot, including Regional Director of Sales and Director of Training, which helped professionals grow their businesses across 20 states and Canada. Tom also served as COO of The Treasury Venue Collection, gaining firsthand experience with venues. He rejoined The Knot Worldwide in 2022 as Director of Vendor Engagement, traveling to coach and connect with wedding pros, in 2024 he connected with over 80K wedding pros.  When not on the road, Tom enjoys time with his family, including his three grandchildren.

The Knot 2025 Real Weddings Study is one of the industry's leading wedding and couple insights report, offering an in-depth look into the current wedding landscape. The report combines insights from nearly 17,000 U.S. couples who got married in 2024, data from couples getting married in 2025, and user behavior trends from The Knot Vendor Marketplace, The Knot Registry, and The Knot Invitations.

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website

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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

What is the not 2025 real wedding study? Tell us about what's going on in the market. Listen to this episode and find out. Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I am so happy to have my friend Tom Chelednik on from Wedding Pro to talk about the Real Wedding Study. Tom, how you doing?

I'm great. I'm so happy to be here. Alan.

You know, you and I go back.

Like 18 years ago, buddy.

That's right, I trained 18 years ago. And look at you now. Look at you now. There you go. And you're doing what I was doing. You're, you're speaking for Wedding Pro and doing things like that. So I, I asked you to come on because the Real Wedding Study comes out and I always read that thing front to back, but not everybody gets a look at it and not everybody understands maybe what to do with that information. So we have some highlights.

We want to talk about that and I also just want you to, you know, tell what are you hearing in the market? People ask me this all the time, what are you hearing in the market, what's going on, stuff like that. So actually why don't we start there? You know, what are you hearing from people now? We're recording this at the end of April. What are you hearing from folks?

Yeah, probably similar to what you're hearing. I'm hearing a lot of what I was hearing last year too. I think 2024 was the year of perfect storms for weddings. And in 2024, when the real last year's World Wedding study came out, the economy has reared its ugly head for time of taking, you know, couples being concerned about the economy. The other thing in 2024 we had this great reading Reset where we were down to 2 million weddings. So there were less leads, less booking. So people felt that that was coming off that 2.1, 2.3 million, you know, all the pent up demand. And then the big thing is last year we're starting to see the generational shift happen.

And last year in Gen Z, last year there were 34% of weddings took place were Gen Z. So anytime you and I have been around long enough that anytime we know there's a generational shift, everything changes. Your business changes, it doesn't change overnight, but it slowly changes as more that generation becomes relevant in the market, in that space. And I did not see enough change last year where people were, where people were struggling, they weren't changing things. Their lead follow ups and how to connect with that generation. And this year it's pretty much the same thing. In 2025 and the real wedding study, the economy came up again. We, you know, everybody should be used to at this point of 2 million weddings because we reset that.

But the generational shift is even more in play here where 50% of weddings taking place this year will be Gen Z. So if you could freeze your business today and move two years in the future and look back at your business and you're still in business and you're profitable, you probably have had some significant change in your products, your, your pricing, your packages, your marketing, your website look, your blogging, how you're responding, the tools you're using to respond. That's the big what I'm hearing in the market. The people that are struggling the most historically when I dig into it, they haven't made enough changes to connect with this Gen Z still plenty of weddings, right.

And so we're on this border of Gen Y and Gen Z. But what I like to tell people is it's not a hard line. It's not like all of a sudden people change. This has been happening, like you said, this has been coming along because the older Gen Z's and the younger Gen Y's are the same people. You know, they didn't. It's not on your birth certificate. You're a Gen Z or a Gen Y. You have to be like this Covid kind of accelerated.

I think a lot of this that, you know, the not doing so much in person, doing much more digitally and stuff like that, it definitely accelerate that. And we're also like you said, the perfect storm. Last year we had a presidential election year. We had the COVID hangover, we had the, the engagement gap and now the economy again. I was just reading an article the other day about the tariffs and the dresses because a lot of the dresses are coming from China and legally you can't change someone's price after you've done a contract with them. Right? They would have to agree to that. But you have a contract that says you're going to deliver this product at this price. That's going to be a problem for a lot of.

Because you know, you know, what day is it, what time of the day is the tariff on, is the tariff off? You know, we don't even know what to. I just saw something that the Port of Seattle has no Chinese ships in it. Right. And what that means is there's going to be a trickle down which says those goods that did not come in Right. What are we going to do now? We're either going to source them somewhere else at a higher price or we're not going to have them. So you can have shortages, price increases, stuff like that. So. All right, so let's get into, let's get into the study itself.

I love the fact that Gen Z actually is more into the idea of having the wedding and having the celebration and doing stuff like that. That was a really good thing to see and that 77% believed that weddings remain as important as ever and 96% say they're grateful for the ability to celebrate in person. This is, I guess, coming off of COVID in person there. So that was something I saw that really stood out for me, that there was kind of a shift, Gen Y going away from some of the, you know, traditional wedding stuff and Gen Z kind of coming back to that. And what the study, what I read in there, it said is if you're younger and getting married, it's more likely that you might be getting help from your parents, which means you might be getting more influence from your parents to do things like that. So that's an, that was an interesting twist there. What was the highlight for you? Go ahead.

Well, on, on that point, right, where they're getting more, more investment from their parents, the I believe the percentage is 63% of parents are paying significant amount of Gen Z. So that whoever paying is going to influence what the wedding is. But Gen Z, which my takeaway was from that part of the study was what's old is new again. More of them are doing bouquet tosses than millennials. 38% versus 23%. Right. Gen Z historically doesn't want a cake. They're more into the dessert bar.

But because the parents are influencing the decisions, they're still doing a cake for a cake cutting, you know, so having both.

They're going to have a cake, but then, but not maybe not as big of a cake. Right. And then they're going to have the dessert bar, which are actually eating right.

And Gen Z is favoring the grand exits more. 43% versus 20% of millennials. And, and of course the unplugged ceremonies, you know, Gen Z 62%, 54. So I think it's interesting. It's not only interesting, every piece of information that you can find as wedding pros can find about Gen Z, you all need to read that and ingest that and not just keep it in your mind. If we know bouquet tosses are back again to a certain extent, we should probably Put some photos or videos or talk about a little bit about bouquet tosses and dessert bars and cake cuttings and things like that to connect with them. The whole study is around. We do this so that we share that information with wedding pros to help them connect with the generations that are coming up, what's important.

And the short videos, which is really important for Gen Z because they've grown up in the Instagram TikTok generation, having short videos of the bouquet, Tosh having short videos of people cutting cake. You don't need to have, you know, 15 minute video of that. You need to have a 30 second video of that. It's like, oh, wow, cool. And then another one and another one. Personalization. Gosh. I mean, I can't remember a study, right.

And I left the not in 2011. I can't remember a study even back then that didn't say personalization was important. I mean it's just such a huge thing. And I think what it comes to is the impression of personalization. So you can have packages as long as people feel like they can customize them. Because a lot of people think that, oh, if I have packages, you know, it's too limiting. No, a price fix menu at a restaurant is a package. But you still have choices within that.

And you know what, some of those choices cost more. Like you want the steak, it cost more than, you know, the regular price of the dinner. But that's your choice to do that. And I think that that came up, that was really important. Personal touches.

I. There's one. I was talking to a wedding pro yesterday, last week who was struggling a little bit and he had packages and of course all his packages were customizable. But he didn't say that on his website. He didn't say that on his lead follow up. And last week when I talked to him and he made that switch and he put, you know, at the top of his website, package customizable and in the, in this follow ups, you know, price ranges from this to this. Couples usually spend this. And it changed his business.

It really changed. Just, you know, people assume their customized. They don't. You got to put it out there. So.

Right. It's what they see first. And what you don't know is the people that never reach out because they didn't see what they wanted. Another thing that stood out here, which I loved, was 73% of couples believe the guest experience should come first. Thank you. Thank you. Right. Like you could elope and you're married.

Right. And there's Elopement companies out there, and there's crazy great elopements now. It's just beautiful things you can do. At my son's wedding last year, There were only 10 of us for the ceremony, right? There were 30 of us the next day and 60 of us the next day, but there were only 10 of us for the ceremony, right? So you can have that and you're married. They could have stopped there and they were done. But 72% of the couples believe the guest experience should come first. These people are spending time and money. They're buying gifts, they're buying clothes, they're hotels and airfare or whatever to come and celebrate.

Please make it about them. Make the reception about them. Ceremony is about you. I will give you that. It should be about you, of course. Make sure your guests can hear. Make sure they can hear your vows and stuff like that. But the experience, when I looked more into it, it was also some of the recommendations from Wedding Pro, talking about the experience of the shopping, like you said, does it say on the website there it's customizable? Does it say on a storefront it's customizable? Are you getting back to people quickly? Are you meeting them where they are with the technology? You know, I'm sure you hear the same thing that I do.

You know, people getting ghosted. Getting ghosted. And then we look in and you see that they're asking for a phone call right away, which would be easier for the business, but not easier for the customer. I had somebody recently, I did a consult second time with him. He's in Italy, and he does destination weddings for Americans and for Brits and stuff like that. And he was getting 1 out of 10 people that he responded like. He'd get 10 inquiries, 1 out of 10 would respond to his message. So we changed what he was saying, shortened it up, got rid of the attachment stuff.

Three days later, he messaged me and said, I've gotten nine new inquiries, and six of them have already responded to me, from 1 out of 10 to 6 out of 9. The inquiry quality didn't change. It was him that changed. This is exactly the point that you started with, is if you're still doing what you were doing a few years ago and it's not working, it's not going to work two years from now.

What'S working eight, six, eight months ago might not be working. You got to change it up. You know, you're talking about guest experience, and, you know, hopefully everybody knows what a lead magnet is. But just in case magnet is a little box or a banner on your website and they click it to get information. And to get that information, what do they do? They have to give you their name and their email address and it becomes a lead. So I am seeing success because personalization and guest experience is so important. Wedding Pro is getting a lot more leads from their website by having a lead magnet that talks about guest experience. Just a quick canva doc and all the cool things that that professional has done or has seen, etc.

It connects and builds that trust with them. So guest experience is not just, you know, you know, in, in photos and videos and things like that, but like be a resource to these people because we know it's important to be able to connect with them. I don't know if you're saying that you're not like, yeah, right.

Well again, lead Magnetic is great for trying to get contact information, right? So in exchange for this document, you're giving me your contact information. So we've all seen that, the pop ups and stuff like that. But talking about the experience, we those of people who have read the story brand, right? The book, the story brand, talking about stories. When I go out and I was just at a venue the other day when we were doing a mock tour, I said, you know, are we talking about the guest experience? Because you think about it, you, the couple will be in those get ready rooms, right? So if it's a bride and a groom, brides get ready room, grooms get ready room, two grooms, two brides, whatever, right? You'll be getting ready. What are your guests doing? So if you think about yourself as a guest when you show up at a wedding, like let's say you're one of the, let's say you're a lucky one, you didn't hit traffic and you get there early, right? What are you doing? You're kind of standing around, right? So would a photo booth be a great idea over there? Something for them to do? Would a paparazzi photographer, as they come up looking the best, they're going to look all night, taking a picture that you give them at the end of the night, handing them a glass of Prosecco champagne or something or a mocktail just to set the experience and then they start thinking, oh yeah, I've been to weddings. It's kind of been like what's happening until boom, then everything's happening. No, that's great. An experience from the beginning.

When my cousin got married, we had to come up an escalator to get to the level with the Banquet rooms and there was a string trio sitting there playing beautiful classical music. Oh, what a beautiful start to the day. Right. So experiences, experiences, but experience of the buying as well, you know, reducing the friction. Something that I was reading in here was talking about and I did a webinar about this for Wedding Pro. Completing your storefront more. But there's also some AI tools that are helping you with that, like helping you choose photos and stuff. Right? I did not know that that's a good thing.

Can you tell me more about that? Do you know more about that?

Yeah, sure, absolutely. We have a photo smart selector that the AI will look at all of your photos that you uploaded and based on your category, your market, etc. It will suggest your main image of the photo that it's more likely to get looked at. You can bypass it if you want to, but it's working, right? And it's working well. So give it a try. Some of the other AI tools that we have too is we take all your five star reviews and we use AI to do a summary of all your reviews. Like it's something, you know, especially where people have 600, 700 reviews. Nobody's reading six or 700 reviews.

That's just the way it is. But there's good information in those, right? So to summarize it, and our couples are loving that, Loving, loving that tool for sure.

Right. And I remember years ago, because I was there when we started with reviews way, way, way, way, way back. Right.

I was there with you.

Right. And I remember one of the challenges as time went on is how does a couple differentiate from this company with 55 star reviews and this one with 55 star reviews. And it came down to, we understood at the time it was what they said, it wasn't that it was five stars, it was what they said. But AI didn't exist. We didn't have the ability to do that. We know that couples read on average five to seven reviews per vendor, except photographers and venues, it's seven to nine. So if you have 600 reviews and they're going to scan the first seven or nine, they're only scratching the surface. And that I love that.

A lot of people didn't realize or maybe don't know even listening to this, that there is that AI summary, which Google is doing stuff like that now, Amazon is doing stuff like that now as well, giving you that summary. So it reads all of those. And those of you listening to the podcast, if you didn't hear the one I did about AI talking about What I'm, what I've been doing for you is exactly this. Taking your reviews, putting them into AI and then asking IT questions about you to get the language for your storefront, for your website, for your emails and things like that.

Or I think I've heard this from you and I've said it too. Taking your competitors reviews. That's right, in AI and putting your. And ask AI to what the differences of the competitor. Fantastic tools. What's the world in which we live in now? Right. It's crazy and, but I'm excited for.

It, you know, and couples are using AI as well, right? They're using it for their personal webpage, they're using it for thank you notes and stuff like that. So you know, it is here I also heard something that a lot of the younger people now are not using Google for searches. They're using ChatGPT or they're using Grok or they're using Claude or Perplexity. And I have to say I do the same thing. I do the same thing. I'll go to Perplexity for more data driven stuff, analytical stuff. I did one the other day because I have my grandson and I'm putting, we're putting away money for his college and I said okay, at an average return of 8%, you know, for the next 10 years, how much is the money that he's got now worth? And I'm like, gosh, will he even be able to buy a book then? You know, because who knows what college will cost. But it was such an analytical thing.

I said I could go look up the formula and do all that. No, I just asked it the question and it can do that. And I've done spreadsheet stuff. I use ChatGPT for more reasoning type stuff and I'll brainstorm with it. And I think if couples are trying to write their webpage they would use that or Claude as opposed to Perplexity, which is more analytical for stuff. But it does show that they're using it. So the photo select or the summaries over there.

Well, the study, Alan, let's study from this year. The one that we're talking about now originally had only about 10% of couples using AI and they were more using it for vowel writing. Thank you. Speech writing. So we updated this study a little bit and now we're already at 20% now using it for that plus starting to planning tools. So obviously AI is playing a big, a big play in wedding planning and getting, getting ideas even with our couples. Right. We have a Couple facing tools.

That's a style quiz on the knot. Allowing them, and I use this, it's pretty amazing. Allowing you to select the type of photos that you love to get the best recommendation. The style of the vendors. So I like this. I like this. I like this. And then it feeds that style of the vendors.

Vendors in and recommends those vendors. So I think it's cool. It's an interesting time to say the least. Right.

Well, but that analysis stuff, because I was looking here, talking about their theme and their vibe and their aesthetics and stuff like that. And they're using buzzwords like fun and romantic fun, where I said, which is a shift from romantic last year. Okay, so we can have fun and we can still be romantic. But their themes, I love this. They're talking about elegance and refinement. Even though they want fun. They're talking about elegance like quotes, old money or quiet luxury. Right.

You know, I guess what, you know, what you're seeing in what they see in the old movies and stuff like that.

Right Back to that, like, Great Gatsby thing. That was like, I don't know, 10 years, 12 years ago you were getting back to that. Well, the colors.

The colors were white, gold and ivory and champagne. There's your Gatsby. Right? That's. That's the Gilded Age. Right? That. That was very cool. We know. I mean, 64 of couples are using wedding planning websites or apps like the Knot and Wedding Wire to streamline the process, which is an increase, actually.

So if you think about the, you know, all of the people, obviously the people using Wedding Pro are using Wedding Pro, but the couples in general, and 75% still view wedding planning websites as irreplaceable resources. You know, a lot of people will say, well, but they have Google. They can Google anything. I said, right. But it's going to send them to 28 different places. And that's what, you know, the. Not when it started in Wedding Wire. When it started, the whole idea was to bring it all together, just bring it into one place.

You know, I started with wedding pages and we were a print planning book because it was the same thing. Yeah. You could have found out a timeline here and checklist there, but we put it all together in a book because we were in the analog age, you know, in the digital age. This is where they're going to go and find it. So I mean. And again, the audience is. Is huge there. So what else stood out to you? What else stood out to you guys? I got a couple of points here.

Yeah. I Mean things, things as simple as colors on a national average. Light greens, light green and light blues are the first and second colors being used in weddings. So that's important to know because you should have some photos you should be talking about, about those colors. Each market's a little bit different. You know, maybe gold is, or ivory or champagne is a little higher. But overall like light blue and light green are certainly those colors. One thing that stood out to Me too is 83% already had a wedding date set prior to their engagement.

I was going to call that one out to 83% had the date set.

70% of them took at least one wedding related action before getting engaged. We know that they're taking a lot more. I mean they're on the knot, they're on wedding, where they're searching what they want, you know, what their needs are. And I think that's such a big number. And I've said this last year and I'm seeing some success with it from some of the pros that I talked to. If we know that they're taking all this action before they get it engaged, why not have a little tab on your website that says before the ring and in that is FAQs, tips and tricks, whatever you're connecting with them, where they are in their journey.

Right. Well, the proposals, that was the other thing that stood out there was the fact that so many of them are planning. One in four of people proposing are now hiring photographers or other vendors, videographers and other, maybe music and stuff like that, Venues, right.

Florists, musicians, you know, but yet when we, I see, and you probably see this too, this is a revenue stream for a business, a category. So how, how long would it take for a planner to put an engagement package together or a venue or you know, a floor, you know, please, we know that it's work, we know that people are doing it. It's just going to continue to increase because what happens is they want to out plan or out, you know, make a bigger production of their proposal than their friends. So they're going to reach out for help.

And they are engaged an average of 15 months and using an average of 14 vendors. Right. But you know, looking at this again, if you don't optimize your website for proposal and things like that, they're not going to find you when they do a search. Right. It's just like anything else. And then of the 14 vendors, the number one, 91% are having a dress, 90% a venue, 87% of photographer, 84% a caterer, 84% groom's attire. Right.

Good news, they're wearing clothes and they're feeding their clients. Right, right.

And you know, we know they're going to have music. We know that they're, they're gonna, you know, there's gonna be flowers and decor and stuff like that. You know, like you said, this is different all over. Just like, you know, the average cost of a wedding is different all over. And I get people asking me all the time, you know, if I was to go into a new market, you know, which is the best market. I said that. You can't answer that. A bigger market with more people is going to have more competition, but there's more people, therefore there's more opportunity.

And you know, the good news is people are still getting married. Two million people a year at least. Couples, not people. Two million couples are getting married in this country. And that's the opportunity there. And you just need to get your piece. You know, nobody's trying to get them all. We're not talking, you and I, right now to, to a national company that's trying to get every wedding out there.

Nobody's, nobody's doing that. But you know, what do you say? What does it say? Wedding pro says 2.4 million couples are signing up on the sites Every year with 7,000 new users per day. 7,000 new per day.

That is crazy. I just got off a global marketing call and we went over statistics with our couple and it just, we got, it's just amazing. You know, we're still getting 21 million unique visits per month on our site and our app is being used on average of, you know, 4,000 downloads per day. I mean it's, it's a very vibrant business to say the least. You know, the wedding business, I always, I always say what business to get in the wedding business. It's $100 billion a year business in the USA. But you had made mention to the national average of weddings and the difference of cost of weddings. And this just happened Monday to me because we, the statistic out there, which is controversial, I want to get it out there is the average wedding cost is $33,000.

Study now that is from somebody that's spending 500 in their backyard and somebody spending 250 on everything else. So it's controversial to the fact, but like most people say, that's not enough. And I live in South Florida. In South Florida. Right, right. But there's markets where I had on Monday saying nobody spends that much money in my market to get married. Right. Like it's, it's to the extent.

And so I went into this budget tool thing that. That budget tool that the couples use to that we just launched recently. And I put you pick a pictures like, I like this, I like this, I like this. These are the type of vendors. Where do I live? And it output, it outputted. Okay. Your wedding's going to be $43,000. That is right on.

That is right on. You know, it'd be tough to get married even at 33. Probably could, you know.

Well, the point is. The point is that you could. Right, because you can elope and you can do all those things. My son, it was over three days now I. They're in the Bay Area, in California, I think all in. They spent probably average for the Bay Area. But we just did it on three days with 10 people, 30 people, 60 people at 1, 2, 3 different venues. Right.

All these different things. It's not that they were looking to save money. They were just looking to do something very non traditional because they've been to all the traditional ones and, and guest experience.

Right. Like talk about. They're the exact.

Yeah. I mean, we got on the cable car and we're taking pictures. We went on a dinner cruise around under the Golden Gate when the sun was going down. There was a party bus taking people over to the venue in Oakland. Right. Live music, a guy making taco stuff. It was great. It was just not a traditional, what we would call a traditional wedding there.

Let's just hit a couple of more things over here. You know, the second word besides personalization that I see all the time is transparency. And this is another controversial one that you and I run into all the time. Transparency. Transparency and pricing. We know that everybody here listening when they are a customer are looking for prices. We wouldn't expect any different of couples. If you've never shopped for something before, you don't have what's called framing.

You don't know what things cost. So you look to something like the study that says 33,000 is the average or 18,000 in what was it, Utah or Alabama, where was it? Utah, I think it was Utah was 18,000 was the average.

Utah and Iowa. Utah and Iowa. Right. And again, Utah has a lot of dry weddings and alcohol is a big cost on weddings there. Right. But transparency, at least giving people an idea of price will help you get better inquiries that you're not getting as many people that can't afford you because let's face it, you put a price range out There it doesn't stop somebody from reaching out who can't afford you. It's an aspirational thing as well, but it could reduce that. And I tell people all the time, fewer but better leads is better for you. Right? Because you can follow up more.

You have more time to follow up. I've had this with clients where they put a price range on their website. The inquiries come down, but the sales go up because the people reaching out have an idea. Now, like you and I and everybody listening, you've gone to a website looking for a price, there wasn't one, and we'd leave and we go someplace else. Right. And you can't see it. My friend David Averin, who wrote a book, why Customers Leave and How to Win Them Back, he said every day this is happening and you can't see it. Like if it was a story, you could see people looking in the window and walking by.

Right. But you can't see this on your website. So transparency photos of real work. Thank you. I love seeing this on there. 64% of couples also want to see high quality visuals that showcase a vendor style and capabilities, show real people, real work that you do. People having a great time. Reviews, I mean, we can't stress this enough, you know, recent reviews, responding to your reviews, you know, besides that summary that's there, that's great.

You have to have recent reviews, you know, and if people don't care what you did three years ago, they care what you did three weeks ago.

And use those reviews and other, other, other marketing and advertising, just don't let them sit on Google or the Knot and Wedding where I grab those, use.

Those, tell the world, but respond, please respond to them because it shows that you're connected. I am a very prolific reviewer of hotels and restaurants because I travel so much and I love when TripAdvisor announces to me somebody's responded to your review. And especially when it's quick because sometimes it's the same day. Because that's how I respond. If I see I got a new Google review, I respond immediately to it. It doesn't take long. A couple of minutes and it's done. And when I see it and I read it and go, okay, that was good.

Like I was in Asheville, North Carolina and Crystal, the waitress, she was fantastic. She was fun to talk to, she knew the menu, she understood my gluten sensitivity and stuff. It was great. I wanted to mention her in the review. I love that they mentioned her in their response as well. It wasn't the generic Response. So please don't do a generic. And if you want to use AI to help you respond to your reviews, just make them different, you know, make them different.

You could ask it to read the review that they wrote and say what was the main point? Or highlight. Not that it should be hard, but I guess some people write a book, right? Some people write those six paragraphs. We love them. But six paragraph review. What's the highlight that I should respond to on here? But it is really important. Recent reviews, responding to reviews. Obviously the score matters and the number matters, but I would say recency and responding is, to me, are the two big ones over there. Anything that we.

We missed here? Oh, actually, how can people get the study?

They can download the QR code that Alan's gonna put up on his.

Some people are listening. So you will get a link and we'll put it into the show notes. So people, you can go get that. Right, right?

You can get it in the show notes. Yes.

Okay. All right. Yeah. Because more people are actually listening than watching. So when I won't put the qr, but we'll put that into the. Into the show notes. Might be able to put the QR in the show notes. That's interesting.

We'll do that. We'll make it so you can get it there. Right. Is there a stat that we didn't talk about that you wanted to talk about? The answer could be no, but I'm just curious.

No, I mean, I just, you know, this. We've been doing the real wedding study longer than Alan And I. Well, 16 years. The real wedding study. 16 years. And it constantly evolves. And this year, there were over 17,000 couples. It's our job, as you know, the Knot and Wedding Wire being the biggest players in the industry, to take that information, slice it, dice it, and get it out, not only on a national level, but also on a market level.

So if you're more interested in your market level statistics, reach out to us, reach out to Wedding Pro Support or your local rep, et cetera, et cetera, and we can dig that down even further for you.

Yeah, but I love if you missed what Tom said about the. The budgeting tool there. Couples can go in and find the average in their market as opposed to this 33,000 across the country, which is kind of irrelevant because you're not getting married across the country. You're getting married in a place. But I love that it'll give them their local average. So they say, okay, you know, like here in New Jersey, the average is $57,000. Yeah, that, that sounds right. 33 doesn't feel right for a typical wedding here.

But again, average is being what they are. You know, I have a friend who's going to spend a quarter of a million dollars on his daughter's wedding. And then there's other people are going to spend 15,000. Right. And yes, you can do it. Right. If you're getting married. Like I said, you can just get married.

Like, you don't, you don't need, you don't need to have a reception. But you know why people do it, Tom? This is my feeling. Because they don't think they're ever going to do it again. They want to celebrate that. Right. That. That's why we do it. My wife and I are coming up on 42 years, so.

And that's because I told her we don't believe in divorce, we believe in murder. So there you go.

There's a couple, it comes to a certain point which is too difficult to break up.

That's that. That's right. Well, the other thing, the other thing is I told her, you know, if you, if you ever leave me, I'm coming with you. So there you go. So, Tom, thank you so much for joining me. We'll put the show notes in there and we'll put in if they want to contact you as well, you know, how to connect with you on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever, email, whatever email. We'll have the show notes there with the link to the survey. If you have not seen it yet, you want to get that, read it through, see what's in there.

Just so you know what couples are talking about these days. And again, if you want to make yourself the one that they want to find out more about, complete your storefront. Get those great photos there. The tool is there to help you complete the pricing information. Just to give them an idea and please just respond. There's so many webinars Tom and I have done and other people about how to respond, how to get better response. Don't fight the system. If couples don't want to get on a phone call right away, don't fight them.

Meet them where they are first and then ask for it and there you go. So, Tom, I will see you soon at a webinar.

Very soon, hopefully. Thank you, Ellen, for having me. I appreciate you for all your. All your brain cells have taught me what I know. So thank you.

Thanks, Tom. Bye.


I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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