You cannot change the route. You can arrive with a different sequence in your head.
Before you go: two questions by email
Ask both in writing, before you spend a Saturday.
What is the all-in cost structure — per head, administrative or service fee percentage, and is that fee itself taxed? A venue that answers this by email is a venue that has answered it before. A venue that says "let's discuss on the tour" has told you something too.
Can we book, and on what terms? At a private club this is the whole question, and the answer decides whether the tour happens at all. Access status, and why we label rather than assume.
If either answer takes three follow-ups, you now know what planning with them will feel like for fourteen months.
Go at the hour of your wedding
The single highest-value change you can make to a tour. A ballroom at 11 a.m. with the house lights up is a different room from that ballroom at 7 p.m. with the lights set where they will actually be set. A terrace in June is a different terrace in October at the same clock time, because the light has gone.
If they will only tour at midday, ask for photographs taken at your hour in your month, and then treat the room as unknown until you have seen it.
Capacity, measured rather than quoted
Get square footage and a seating diagram at your headcount, not at the venue's preferred one. If a venue will not produce a diagram, that is not a filing problem.
Then walk the route the food takes and the route the guests take, and find where they cross. The bottleneck in a hall is almost always a doorway — the moment 170 people move from cocktails to seated in the same six-foot gap. Throughput is what a hall is actually selling.
The fee question, asked precisely
There is a sentence you are looking for in the contract, and it is required to be there in 12-point type or larger: the one stating that the administrative charge is not a gratuity (12 NYCRR 146-2.19). Ask to see it on the tour. If it is not in the document, the venue has a compliance problem and you have leverage you did not know about.
Then ask the three-way question that makes proposals comparable: which of these are inside the per-head, which are inside the administrative fee, and which are additional? Run it against ceremony fee, cake cutting, coat check, valet, overtime, vendor meals, bartender counts, room flip labor, and the price of a child's plate. The full list, and what each point of fee costs.
Ask about the rain in the present tense
Not "do you have a rain plan." Ask to be taken to it now, and ask its seated capacity with a dance floor in it, its price, and who makes the call and when. Stand in it. How to price the wedding wet.
Ask what else is happening that day
Which room, whose event, where the two guest flows meet, and whether both bands sound-check in the same hour. In a hotel, add: what is the elevator situation for load-in, and is there a corporate group in the building.
Walk the exit
Everyone tours the entrance. The end of the night is where the wedding actually goes wrong.
Find the coat check and time one retrieval, walking included. Multiply by your guest count, divide by the number of attendants staffed after 10 p.m., and get that staffing number written into the contract rather than agreed to verbally. Then look at where 60 cars queue, whether the valet stand can turn that many in twenty minutes, and where your guests wait while it happens.
If the venue is on public land
County parkland and municipal courses carry gate hours, separate concessionaire contracts and access rules that are not in your catering agreement (Westchester County Parks). Ask who you would be signing with, and ask when the gates lock — for your vendors in the morning and your guests at night.
Before you leave, ask for three documents
The floor plan. A sample contract, not a proposal. And the fee page with the percentages spelled out.
A venue that hands over all three the same week is one you can plan with. A venue that will send the contract "once you place a deposit" is asking you to buy the document that tells you what you bought.
And one question for yourself
Would you have booked the indoor alternate on purpose? If not, you know what you are actually choosing between.