‘Don’t let it get ugly’ is advice amid Covid wedding heartache
● Lack of clarity on when normal weddings will resume is causing huge frustration
Couples planning their weddings are losing huge sums in deposits because their wedding date has been repeatedly postponed as a result of ever-changing Covid restrictions.
Tara Fay, one of Ireland’s leading wedding planners, is all too aware of the difficulties facing everyone involved, and says she can see the problem both from the couple’s point of view and the wedding suppliers’ point of view. And her advice to them is “don’t let it get ugly”.
Ms Fay has been conducting an Instagram live chat once a month since the start of the pandemic to try to help the industry and couples navigate their way through the confusion.
“I am saying ‘Pick up the phone, try and work something out, don’t let it get ugly, because that is not in anybody’s interest’. Everybody is stressed,” she said.
Speaking to the Sunday Independent this weekend after the restrictions effectively wiped out this year’s wedding season, Ms Fay said a lack of clarity is causing huge frustration.
“Some couples I have spoken to have had to postpone their wedding three or four times and my heart goes out to them,” she says. “For them, it’s like a giant game of Jenga because a wedding has a minimum of 20 to 25 different suppliers feeding into it.” Describing the level of organisation that goes into a wedding, she said: “People forget how many [suppliers] are needed. For bridal clothing alone, you could have four or five different people feeding into it; then you have your stationers, the invitations, then you have your photographer, your videographer, the entertainment.
“All of those different elements are being cancelled at the moment so there are lots of different elements to this.
“Every time someone changes their
date, they have to find a new date that suits them, they have to find a date that suits the partner and then they have to go and find out which suppliers can move with them. The first time round, all of the suppliers were being really, really open,” she said.
But the constant cancellations are causing problems and suppliers are becoming increasingly frustrated because “they have blocked out those dates”.
Describing what happened during last year’s disrupted wedding season, which ran, partly, from June 29 to January 2, she said: “A couple that changed their booking, maybe they moved the wedding date without any additional penalty — but then they have to move the date a second time.
“Then it comes around to the third time of moving the date. I know a couple will think no work has gone into it [from the suppliers’ side], but there has, and people like photographers are also holding dates for them; people like bridal shop owners are holding dresses for them. So I can see it from the suppliers’ point of view too.”
From the couple’s standpoint, she said it is also “incredibly frustrating because they are saying to the supplier ‘Well, hang on a minute. Yes, we signed a contract to say we were paying for 150 guests because we thought we were going to actually have 150 guests. But now the Government is telling us we can only have 25 guests and yet you still want to charge us for 100 guests? How is that possible?’ So it is incredibly frustrating for both sides.”
On the amount of money at risk for couples, she said people are placing deposits of up to €600 on each supplier. But she said these costs add up when you multiply it out to many suppliers. The lack of clarity surrounding the measures is causing huge problems in the industry, said Ms Fay.
“The fact the Government stick their head in the sand and just pretend that weddings are only a little frivolity as opposed to a huge business in Ireland is causing massive problems and the longer they ignore it, the greater the problems they are creating.”
What is causing even further confusion is “no single department will take responsibility for weddings in Ireland.
“The Department of Tourism issued guidance last summer on the numbers allowed at a wedding, but if you ask the Department of Tourism, they will tell you ‘We are not responsible for weddings.’
Her comments come after a wedding supplier survey, conducted over a tenday period at the end of last January among 500 businesses active in the wedding industry in Ireland, found the industry has a value of €2.3bn to the Irish economy a year.
For 44pc of the respondents, weddings also make up over 75pc of their income — leaving them and their families along with employees in a highly precarious financial position for 2021.
Sixty per cent of the wedding professionals — from wedding planners to wedding bands, marquee builders to florists, bakers to dress designers — lost more than 75pc of their wedding business last year.
That amounts to over €1bn in lost revenue.