Wedding plans take hit with virus rollback
According to the governor, the party is possibly over.
A reversal on coronavirus restrictions for events and gatherings means couples with big plans to tie the knot need to uninvite a lot of guests or cancel their wedding for this year.
“There were a lot of people that went into immediate panic mode,” event planner Lisa Antonecchia said of Gov. Ned Lamont’s recent announcement. Antonecchia is a wedding and event planner who owns Creative Concepts by Lisa.
This Phase 2.1 caps indoor gatherings to 25 people and outdoor events to 50 people, which limits events by an additional 75 people indoors from what was allowed at the beginning of October.
“We don’t know how long this phase 2.1 will last so it puts the event industry in a precarious situation,” she said. “These events might have been moved twice already, so do you tell your clients to reduce their guest list?”
When Lamont announced Phase 2.1 Nov. 2, events planned for that weekend were grandfathered under the prior guidelines, but all those for the following days had to change.
Antonecchia said the average wedding in Connecticut is more than 100 guests and while all of her clients had already decided to reschedule to next year at the earliest, the rollback has still impacted many vendors and couples.
Teresa McGinley and Larry Kristoff invited 100 people to their wedding planned for Dec. 31 and sent out their invitations just before the rollback to Phase 2.1 was announced.
“Because Lamont presented it and everyone presented it like we had to flatten the curve and we did that, we thought we’d be in the clear when it got to December,” he said.
People had started to RSVP, so they decided to keep their original date but try to book two venues to accommodate their guests and connect both parties virtually, McGinley said.
“We’re really flustered,” Kristoff said.
McGinley said the restrictions are also inconsistent.
“We went out to eat recently and looked around the room, there were at least 50 people between all of the tables,” she said. “Much in the same way our guests would be spaced to eat at our wedding. So to know a room full of strangers can all sit and dine together and we can’t bring together our friends and family is quite frustrating.”
But they said they don’t want to put the day off and pause their lives, so they’re forced to figure out some way to make it work and uninvite a number of guests.
For Emily Turbert, of West Haven, planning her wedding to fiance Kevin Mychajlowskyj has been “a wild ride.”
They had up to 125 guests planned for their Nov. 20 ceremony but had to scale back as all the phases occurred. By the time Phase 3 came around, Turbert said they thought they were in the clear, but because of the rollback had to scale back even further.
“We have a date set in April as well to fall back on, if we don’t lose the deposit, but we really wanted it to be a November wedding,” she said. “We also didn’t want to wait on our wedding. We didn’t want to wait three years before starting our lives together.”
Turbert said because their venue at Great River Golf Course in Milford has an attached restaurant, they’ll be able to divide the reception between the restaurant and the ballroom to safely accommodate more people.
But even if they could only have an intimate ceremony, she said they still wouldn’t wait on getting married.
“We’re definitely still excited,” she said. “It’s been a trying time for everyone, but I really feel like we deserve the day. Our guests deserve the day because we’ve been doing our part in keeping the numbers down. We stay home as much as possible and we’re always wearing masks and social distancing. We’ve been doing our part to make sure this wedding happens.”
Because of the pandemic, many weddings didn’t happen this year, though. Antonecchia said of the 25 events she had planned for this year, only six took place, three of which were new clients that came to her in the middle of the pandemic.
“Financially, our industry is going to be devastated through 2022,” she said. “Our contracts have moved a year ahead and those contracts aren’t developing any new revenue because they’ve just been moved. Now we’re considering 2022 and 2023 for new bookings. Getting the industry back on their feet won’t begin until 2024.”