At Gretna Green, our business of ‘selling love’ is thriving

The average cost of a wedding at Gretna is £2,000, said John Holliday, the executive chairman of Gretna Green Ltd. In large part, this is because about half of the 3,750 ceremonies at Gretna this year will be just for the bride and groom. The majority of the weddings are for between two and 20 people.

Holliday believes Gretna is well placed to capitalise on demand for these smaller ceremonies. The number of weddings at Gretna increased by 5 per cent last year, despite a fall in the number of marriages in Scotland overall, and revenue increased by 10 per cent. He aims to double the size of the business over the next five years.

“Of course we’re seeing cost of living pressures, but the functional act of getting married is not discretionary,” he said. “The size and scale of the wedding is, and the ideal for couples is to do more with less — have a nicer experience with fewer people.”

The £8 million investment will go into building a new and more attractive entrance to the wedding venue, as guests staying in one of the company’s two hotels at the site have to cross a main road to reach the blacksmith’s shop and the five other rooms where weddings are held.

There will also be a new restaurant and landscaping, and the company plans to build a working blacksmith’s shop as well as other tourist attractions. Gretna has half a million visitors a year, in addition to wedding guests, Holliday said.

The investment will be self-funded by Gretna, which had revenue of £14.4 million in the last financial year, including income from farms and other businesses it owns.

Holliday is also looking beyond the UK, to that even more famous destination for runaway couples, for inspiration.

“I’m going to a wedding fair in Vegas in a few weeks, and one of the questions I have in my mind is, ‘What is the limiting factor with Gretna Green?’ And I think part of the answer is the location. It is remote, so we need to turn it into a destination.”

One difference with Las Vegas is that you need the right paperwork to get married at Gretna these days, and the Scottish government form takes 29 days to be processed.

While you can get still get married at the age of 16 in Scotland, another growth area for Gretna is at the other end of the age spectrum. The company held 460 vow renewal ceremonies last year, double the previous year, and Holliday believes the trend has legs.

“With 40 per cent of marriages ending in divorce, the 60 per cent, when they get to say twenty years, everyone around them says ‘well done’,” he said. “I think renewal could become part of the marriage journey.”

In addition to deciding on a growth strategy, the biggest challenge the company faced when he arrived was staff retention, in common with most hospitality businesses and particularly in rural areas. Gretna employs 280 people. Holliday met all of them in person to ask what they felt could be improved, and the company has also started a future leaders club for promising staff, to “inspire them that there’s a big world out there”, Holliday said. Executives from Sky, McKinsey and O2, with whom he worked in previous jobs, have come up to Gretna to talk to the group about subjects including creativity and customer service.

Holliday joined the company in 2022 following the death of Alasdair Houston, the former executive chairman and a member of the family that owns Gretna Green, at the age of 59. He started his career as a professional footballer at Carlisle United, before becoming a journalist and working for Sky, ITV, the BBC and Bloomberg, and then running Globelynx, a broadcast technology company.

He admits that when he was playing football, if someone had said he would end up running Gretna Green he would have said they were mistaken. But he has since embraced the business of “selling love”.

“We don’t have to come up with a corporate ‘purpose’, we have an answer,” he said. “We’re here to make people happy. And while Gretna is about history and tradition, we’re also here to build a future for the company.”