Planning a Wedding in 2021 or 2022 | What to Expect

It’s no surprise that we’ve started to see a substantial uptick in inquiries from couples who are ready to start planning a 2021 wedding. Many of them are already reaching out about planning a 2022 wedding. With all of the hopeful news about vaccines, and a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel, the floodgates of pent up demand for weddings and celebratory social events are starting to swing wide open. You may also have noticed news coverage of various economic experts and epidemiologists sharing their forecasts that our future will include a robust enthusiasm for social celebration. Just as the “roaring 20’s” followed the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, so we may see something similar once we’re on the other side of the COVID-19 nightmare we’ve all been enduring together as a society.

In April 2020, in the early days of pandemic lockdowns and quarantine restrictions, I wrote a post on How to Start Planning a 2021 Wedding during the COVID-19 Pandemic. If you haven’t read that post, I encourage you to start there first, as all of the advice still holds true. In the months since then, we’ve helped our clients reschedule and postpone weddings , and we’ve learned a lot as a company, as a team, and as a a broader industry.

So let’s talk about what to expect, if you’re newly engaged, or perhaps got engaged in 2020 and decided to wait a bit before starting to plan your wedding.

Photography by Nancy Ray

If you want to get married in 2021, you need to act fast.

Remember that more than an entire year’s worth of wedding season was upended by the pandemic. I say more than a year, because it’s not just 2020 weddings that were postponed. We’re already seeing additional postponements from spring 2021 dates for couples who desire larger celebrations and have realized they need to wait longer.

Wedding venues, vendors, and suppliers have limited capacity left to offer you as they’ve been forced to fill so many 2021 dates with weddings that were originally scheduled for last year.

You may need to be prepared to expand the geographic reach of your search, consider off-peak dates, and be flexible in your approach to planning.

We expect a rise in destination weddings in 2022.

While 2021 will likely still include lingering travel restrictions and hesitancy on the part of your guests who may not yet feel comfortable hopping on a plane or risking exposure from crowds of people, it seems likely that by 2022 (if not late 2021), people will be ready, willing, and excited to travel.

We fully expect to see more destination weddings in the near future, both with domestic and international destinations. This means the most interesting and beautiful destination venues may experience even higher demand than usual.

Start with a realistic budget for 2021 or 2022 weddings.

There is so much misinformation circulating when it comes to budgeting for a wedding. How much does a wedding really cost? Maybe $15,000. Maybe $25,000. Maybe $50,000. Maybe $250k. Maybe $500k+ There is no singular answer to this question, because asking the question itself is similar to asking “How much does a house cost?”

A house in one neighborhood may cost $125k. A nearby house just several blocks away may cost $800k. The location, age, quality, curb appeal, landscaping, fixtures, appraisal value, and upgrades (or lack thereof) are all factors at play, even if the houses are the exact same square footage.

Your wedding budget cannot and should not be determined merely by looking up the average cost of a wedding, because that average is not grounded in any of the particular details relevant to your celebration, including (but not limited to):

• The number of guests

• The geographic location and the venue (Do you need a tent? That’s a whole other ballgame… and it’s never accounted for in online budget calculators and media stories.)

• The level of formality (I don’t just mean your guests’ attire… I mean type of dinner service, décor, etc.)

• Your individual priorities and preferences as they pertain to quality of any number of services such as photography, entertainment (Band? DJ? Both?), videography, floral design, transportation, catering, etc.

• And if you’re planning to host a wedding at a private home, there are many additional factors to consider.

Furthermore, it’s important to understand that you should not expect pricing for a 2021 or 2022 wedding to be the same as it might have been when booked in 2020. Across the board, it’s customary for rates to gradually increase year over year, but in the context of the pandemic - which largely sidelined and dramatically crippled the live event industry - most businesses need to increase their rates to simply continue to survive and return to a level of stable revenue. This is not something that should scare you, nor is it something to be angry about. If you want to have your wedding at a venue that typically does 50 weddings per year, but that venue was only able to do 10 in all of 2020/early 2021, then you need to be understand that the venue’s owner is working overtime to recoup their loss, stabilize their revenue, and bolster their bottom line so that they can stay in business to serve you.

Budgeting for a wedding is hard, and it can feel overwhelming. The single best investment you can make is to hire a wedding planner who can help you wisely steward your budget and set realistic expectations to help guide you in strategic decision making. Your planning process should be joyful! It should not be grounded in financial uncertainty. I’ve shared much more on this in the past and highly encourage you to read this post on what to do once you’re engaged and how to hire a planner, how to budget, and more.

Make the planning process enjoyable and focus on each other’s happiness.

A full-service wedding planner will make your planning process substantially more enjoyable, but even if you choose a DIY planning approach, I hope you’ll take this advice to heart. Keep your partner’s happiness at the forefront of your decision making, and ask/expect that he/she does the same for you. The details of your wedding matter tremendously, but they should never become a source of anxiety or disagreement. Your wedding represents the start of your marriage, and you’re sharing this experience with the person you love most.

2020 was a heck of a year. We all felt confusion, sadness, worry, and at times - even fear. 2021 and 2022 can be different, and if you’re planning to wed in either of these years, you can count it all joy.

Cheers!

Becca