The 10 best wedding venues in Jeddah

Saudi Arabia has no civil marriage. A marriage contract is concluded under Sharia before an authorised ma'thun and registered through the courts, and Saudi nationals arrange it through the Ministry of Justice's electronic marriage-contract service. For a non-Muslim foreign couple there is no route to a legally recognised ceremony in the Kingdom, so the marriage itself must be registered at home and anything held in Jeddah is a celebration rather than the legal act. Muslim expatriates resident in the Kingdom can sometimes marry locally, but the process runs through their employer's paperwork, their embassy and a court, so speak to your embassy in Riyadh or your consulate in Jeddah well before you commit to a date.

Almost every hall quotes a hire fee plus catering per head, and the head count effectively doubles because the men's and women's sides are catered separately. Hotel ballrooms tend to bundle more into the package, including service, staging and basic lighting, whereas a dedicated ballroom like Leylaty runs its own kitchen and quotes menus directly instead of routing you to an outside caterer. Ask specifically whether the kosha, the flowers dressing it and the singer sit inside or outside the venue quote, because that varies between properties and is where most of the surprise sits.

November to March if any part of the evening is outdoors, and Shawwal, the month after Ramadan, if you want to marry when everyone else does, which is exactly why those dates disappear first. Venues here expect six to twelve months for a peak-season Thursday or Friday night, the Saudi equivalent of a weekend slot; Leylaty states that range outright and the large Corniche ballrooms behave the same way. Midsummer is much easier to book and much harder to sit through, since the humidity off the Red Sea holds well past midnight.

Considerably larger. Leylaty's second ballroom takes 1,500 and the ballroom at Rixos Obhur takes 1,200, while each of The Ritz-Carlton's two grand ballrooms seats 600 and the pair can be run at once. At the other end, the biggest room at Rosewood Jeddah holds about 100, and Habitat's Princess Hall 300. If your list is under about 150 people, look at the hotels rather than the big dedicated halls, because an under-filled 2,000-square-metre room reads to guests as an empty one.