About The Aisle

The Aisle is a South African wedding venue directory. We track 3 739 venues across 101 towns and cities that hold at least eight venues each, carrying 1 091 531 Google reviews between them. Every venue is listed with its rating, its review count, where it is, and how to contact it directly.

How we rank venues

Ranking is one calculation applied everywhere. Every “best of” list on this site is a slice of it, never a hand-picked selection, so two pages can never disagree about which venue is stronger.

• Rating, adjusted for how many people rated it. A 5.0 from 26 reviews does not outrank a 4.9 from 400. We use Bayesian shrinkage toward the dataset mean, so a score only moves away from the average as the evidence for it accumulates.
• A minimum of 25 reviews before a venue can appear in a ranked national list. Below that a rating is noise.
• Confirmed wedding venues only. Search results for “function venue” return laser tag operators, conference centres and video production companies. Each listing’s Google business category is checked, and anything that is not a venue is excluded rather than quietly ranked.
• Unknowns are ranked lower, never hidden. A venue that has not published a price or a capacity still appears, marked as such. Hiding what we do not know would empty most pages and mislead you about what is available.

Where the information comes from

Venue details, ratings and review counts come from Google Places. Photographs come from the venue’s own Google listing or its website; we hold 39 862 of them ourselves rather than linking to someone else’s server, so a page does not break when a venue redesigns its site.

Reviews are shown as the reviewer wrote them, attributed by name, and never edited or reworded. We hold 15 360. Where we summarise what reviewers say, the summary carries no name and no quotation marks, because those are our words rather than theirs.

Cost figures are attributed to the South African source that published them and are never our estimate. Where we state a count — venues, reviews, capacity — it is computed from our own records and is the same number the page below it shows.

If you run a venue

Listings are compiled from public sources, so yours may already be here. Claiming it lets you correct the details, add pricing and capacity, and respond to enquiries directly.

Corrections

If something here is wrong — a closed venue, a wrong address, a review that is not yours — tell us and we will fix it. Accuracy is the only thing this site has to offer that a search results page does not.