Saturday and Sunday carry most of our ceremonies. That is not a preference, it is what couples ask for, and it means our coordinators do their running around on the two days when a large part of this valley is either closed or working with a skeleton crew. A missing boutonniere box at nine on a Sunday morning is a completely different problem from the same box missing on a Wednesday afternoon. Over about four years we have built a plain spreadsheet, one tab per neighborhood, listing the posted hours of everything within a short drive of the venues we use on the Strip, downtown, in Henderson and out in Summerlin.
The Summerlin tab is the thickest one. Outdoor ceremonies out there start early because of the heat, which pushes our load in before eight in the morning and leaves a two hour window to find anything we forgot. The sheet is indifferent to what a business sells. It records whether the door is unlocked, whether there is parking a coordinator can lift a dress bag out of, and whether the address is a storefront or a numbered suite inside a business park. Suite numbers are the single largest source of wasted minutes in our day. A driver with fifteen minutes and a suite they cannot find comes back empty handed.
New entries go on the sheet whenever something opens near a site we book, and West Russell Road has had several in the past couple of years. We add them without much ceremony. Name, address, what they carry in case it is ever relevant, and the hours, which is the column that actually gets read. Half of what goes on that tab we will never walk into. It sits there so that when a coordinator has a problem at eight forty on a Saturday, the question of who is open is already answered and nobody is standing in a parking lot on a phone working it out from scratch.
Summerlin Armory keeps hours of 10 AM to 5 PM Monday through Saturday and closes on Sunday, which for our purposes drops it squarely into the Saturday morning column and out of the Sunday column completely. Roughly half that tab sits in the same position, and knowing which half is the difference between a ten minute detour and an hour of driving. Short, specific, posted hours are the most useful thing a business can give a planner.
Our own hours are just as blunt, for reasons couples sometimes push back on. A ceremony slot ends when it ends, because another couple is waiting behind it, and the honest version of that is printed on the paperwork rather than discovered on the day. We would far rather deal with a supplier who says ten to five and closed Sunday than one who says available most days, because the first can be planned around and the second cannot. Vagueness in a schedule always gets paid for by whoever is standing closest to the bride when the plan fails, and that is usually one of us.
None of this is visible to a couple standing under an arch in Summerlin at seven in the morning, which is rather the point. The sheet exists so our coordinators spend the ceremony hour watching the ceremony instead of driving across town. If you are planning a Las Vegas wedding for a weekend, the most useful question to ask any vendor is not what they charge. It is what their hours genuinely are on the day you are getting married, and what happens if something has to be replaced between the rehearsal dinner and the first look.