Calgary pandemic weddings remain on hiatus as COVID-19 restrictions lift

It was a difficult time to plan a wedding during the pandemic but it seems it’s also challenging to do it this year.

Lifted restrictions and wedding season mean a boost in business for event centres in Calgary.

But this would also boost the difficulty in planning weddings.

Wedding venues like the Heritage Centre confirm the past two years have been the toughest because they had clients who cancelled and did not want to reschedule. That meant refunding payments.

Now that restrictions have been lifted, wedding vendors have had a sense of relief.

Debora Rice-Salomons, the president and owner of the Heritage Centre, says the business is forecasting growth this year of just a little over their revenue in 2019.

“We have people who were supposed to book in 2020. They moved it to 2021 and now we’re hosting them in 2022,” said Rice-Salomons. “So we are backed up, doubled up. You should see weddings multiple days in a row. Absolutely, people are anxious to get married and have a celebration.

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“Getting vendors on our date has been a struggle. Now we’re competing with weddings that are rebooking from two years ago. So you’re getting this year’s wedding, last year’s wedding, and the weddings from 2020 all trying to reschedule. So we’ve lost some of our vendors due to booking conflicts.

“We’ve had to turn away a lot of people because we only host one wedding a day.

“It is in fact disappointing that we have to turn those people away. If we could host 10 weddings a day in August of 2022 we can fill them. It’s just there’s that many people that have been backed up waiting to get married.”

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Some couples are thankful they are finally getting married this coming summer after all the challenges they faced planning a wedding through the pandemic.

Krystin and Shaun Cowling originally planned to get married in 2020 but had to reschedule twice because of safety concerns.

Now Krystin says the biggest challenge of planning a wedding post-pandemic is trying to book new vendors.

“And I think the biggest struggle is just not knowing if these companies were going to still be there when we needed to go forward.

“The biggest frustration is to getting hold of everybody again. You know we’ve had some hiccups now rescheduling where we’ve had to get some different vendors or like price changes. And now it’s more than what we were willing to pay for originally.”

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Another couple shares the same sentiment. Demara Mills says she and her now-husband Keith Mills planned to get married back in 2021 but had to reschedule to this year.

Mills said the biggest challenge of postponing their wedding was constantly checking how many people they can have in their venue.

“The biggest thing for us was the stress for our guests and ourselves for having to cancel and reschedule, and I’m working with Alberta Health restrictions and numbers and all of that sort of thing,” said Mills.

“Everything became so uncertain that we didn’t think that we’d be able to proceed with our numbers and it had gotten to the point with the restrictions that we could only have ten people including ourselves and our photographer. And so with our parents and siblings, we wouldn’t have been able to have all those people there.”

But Mills adds they are fortunate to get the venue and date they wanted.

“Because we planned a winter wedding, we had more wedding dates available to us and our wedding venue was able to provide us those dates when we postponed,” said Mills.

A forecast done by ‘The Wedding Report’ shows a 94 per cent increase in weddings from 2020 to 2022.