The Garden Marquee Silver Package is the smallest and lowest cost option available at Elite Tents. It was originally made available during the UK lockdown to provide shelter for small garden parties with plenty of space for social distancing. It as since become a regular offering catering for 40 guests, with seating for 30. Just like all of The Elite Tent options, this tent is available at 3 package levels: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. It is sometimes also offered in a Christmas Package during the festive season. As is the case with all of the packages at Elite tents, they are a guide and can be customised!
Today we’re going to focus on the Silver Garden Marquee Package: it’s contents, it’s cost and it’s common uses. We are going to do our best to remain impartial and discuss the bad points as well as the good. So here’s our review, warts and all!
Package Contents
The Garden Marquee Silver Package includes the 4x8m marquee, with flooring (dependent on what surface it is going on), basic lighting, and seating for up to 30 guests on a mixture of benches and chairs, with straight wooden tables. The aim was to create a package with the party essentials. A place to sit, and space for any activities with flooring to keep you off the mud and lights to keep the event going into the night!
The flooring you receive as standard for this package is the tightly woven matting that is also used for the larger tents at Elite. However, this is only available for grassed areas as it needs to be pegged to the ground. Depending on the surface that you want the tent to go on, there are sometimes other flooring solutions available. Make sure you speak to the Elite team about this before you book if it is something you are interested in! The woven matting is very high quality. It is deemed more than good enough for weddings, and is often described as ‘high heel friendly’. If you have a flat grassed area, there is no doubt that this flooring will work brilliantly for your event. The potential downside to the matting is that it forms to the shape of the ground. This means if your ground isn’t flat, your flooring wont be either. Specialist marquee companies can sometimes offer solutions to this, but Elite Tents do not.
The furniture is also high quality and comes from the Elite wedding packages. 2m rustic tables look great with table runners and can seat up to 8 guests on benches, or 6 guests on wooden folding chairs. Due to the slats in the tables we don’t recommend using full table cloths as you may lose things down the gaps! But runners look lovely, as do centerpieces or minimalist décor.
The lighting in the silver package purely functional. It comes in the form of spotlights fixed to the upper part of the marquee frame. The lighting is low power and only requires a single 13A plug socket within 15m of the tent. The lighting is fine to see what you are doing, but does not add anything décor/atmosphere wise. You’ll have to look at the gold and platinum packages for this!
The Marquee
The Elite Tents Garden Marquee is 4x8m in size. It is usually staked to the ground on grassed areas, so an extra 1.5m on each side is advised for the ropes. On hard flooring, ballast is used to secure the tent.
The covers of this marquee are made from high quality, industry leading 650gsm PVC. The sidewalls and end panels connect to each other with thick velcro and Dutch lacing. This is because the panels are so robust and hard wearing that most zips will not work well with it. The doorway can be on whichever side you prefer. Also you can have clear windows if you wish, or white walls.
Price
The lowest price you will get for this setup is £595 including delivery, Damage waiver & VAT. To get this price, your event needs to be between the start of November and the end of March, excluding December. You also have to be within 30 miles of the Elite Tents base in Aldridge, WS9. This price also assumes you are not having heating added on, which for the time of year may be needed!
There are two standard pricing categories for the Garden Marquee, with the tent not usually being available for hire June – August during peak wedding season. There can be exceptions to this, especially on short notice, where we may hire out the marquee in the summer, but premium dates can come with a premium cost due to the popularity of the dates. £750 is a normal price to be quoted for this package on the remaining months of the year. Factors such as additional delivery or add-ons can increase this price. With the silver package, it is rare that your quote be lowered for reasons such as not using the furniture or flooring. This is because it is the lowest package, and the cost of the crew (who are very highly trained) along with reserving one of the limited spaces in the diary still need to be covered. The cost of a silver package is often the lowest we are willing to supply a tent for.
In terms of how we compare to other companies on price for a Garden Marquee, we are definitely not cheap. Elite Tents has never tried to be the lowest cost solution; we aim to be the best. For this reason we are in the higher price brackets for most of our packages, but we always strive to provide the value that comes with it. However, we are not a specialist marquee provider. This means we cannot always be as accommodating or flexible as other suppliers, as we do not supply as many add-ons, sizes or flooring options. Take your time to make sure this package and what Elite can offer are the right fit for you. Speak with the team and we will be open and honest in helping you figure this out.
Of course, the only way to find out for definite what your tent is going to cost you is to get in touch with the Elite team for a quote!
Uses
The Garden Marquee is perfect for a garden party with up to 40 guests; potentially more in the summer if you are utilising an outdoor space. Birthday parties, christenings, baby showers, Christmas/new years events and many more events have been held under the marquee. It can make an excellent solution for a big family dinner if your dining room isn’t suitable for a high guest number.
With the stripped back silver package, the tent can make a great check-in space for larger events, or an information point. Basically if your event needs shelter with a place to sit down, this is a great option to do so. With a much cleaner look than a gazebo, as well as being much sturdier, this is the easier option with the crew setting up and packing down for you so that you can focus on the more important parts of your day.
Unlike the other tents in the Elite Tents range, the Garden Marquee Silver Package may require a lot of decoration, depending on your event type and theme. With steel poles and white PVC walls, you may decide to hide as much as possible, something which isn’t an issue for the Nordic Tipis or Aurora Sailcloth.
Problems
The problem with this package is that to get the most from it, you need a grassed area bigger than 8x4m that is relatively flat. For a lot of people this isn’t an issue, in which case this is a great solution and we would advise contacting the team for a chat! However, if your space is on 2 height levels, or isn’t flat, this probably isn’t the package for you. Similarly, if you are looking for something more glamourous, with a dancefloor or fairy lights, you probably want to look at the Gold or Platinum packages!
Conclusion
All in all, this is an excellent tent package. The quality is very high and you will not be disappointed. You just need to take the time to make sure it fits your needs. If you are unsure, or would rather just have a chat instead of searching through the website, contact the team at Elite Tents today!
