LONDON, ONT. -- As non-essential businesses have been ordered to close, couples hoping to get married this spring and summer are now contemplating the postponement of their big day.
“Any weddings in April, May, or June are our top priority right now,“ says Lauren De Koster, owner of Twelfth Night Events. ”Those are the couples that we’re focusing on finding postponement dates for at this time.”
Those dates are becoming more and more likely to not fall on the traditional day for weddings.
“One of the biggest hurdles is getting your mind around having a wedding on a Friday or a Sunday,” says De Koster, “once you come to terms with that and you’re open to it, it’s essentially a transfer or all of your vendors to your new date.”
Nathan Durand and Danielle Rivest were planning a mid-June wedding, but decided to make a change this weekend.
“We made that decision, we were thinking June would be okay, things would kind of be over by then. We really don’t know, and we just wanted to get ahead of it,” says Durand, who spent the weekend contacting vendors to move their wedding to October.
Rivest suggests brides should at least consider their alternatives.
“I think it’s good to be having those conversations now, and trying to decide what the best course of action is, just in terms of where they’re at and what they’re expecting their wedding to look like.“
As for the wedding industries, Rob Aitken of Music Central says this will be the most difficult year in the company’s nearly 40 years.
”There’s a lot of trepidation, there’s some nervousness especially if it seeps into July.”
If physical distancing measures continue into the summer months, Aitken says it will prove a fatal blow for many industry professionals.
“There will be some casualties...in the wedding industry, in the hospitality industry, every industry there’s going to be some casualties unfortunately. Hopefully our government helps us out, but at the same time they can only help us out so much.”
Aitken is hosting three video chats a week with colleagues and couples to keep the conversation open, and to offer advice on how to best weather the storm.
