Covid: wedding help

Unfortunately, many venues are not allowing refunds. Most of the down payments in contracts are considered "non-refundable" so besides postponing (or seeing if you can transfer it) there is not really much that you can do.

Is it possible for you to just cut your guest list so you won't lose out on a bunch of money?

Many places are offering postponing as an option, though some places aren't even doing that. Some people have lost their whole deposit, and not offered the opportunity to postpone or cancel or anything. I realize that splitting the wedding over three days isn't ideal, but if everyone already purchased their travel arrangements, would paying the extra cost be cheaper than losing out on travel funds if you were to postpone? Otherwise, I would look at the costs of all options and compare each one to figure out what the best cost financially would be, and also consider what the best option from other aspects would be.

View Quoted Comment Hi Yasmine & Lisa,
Thank you for your responses. Since we aren’t getting married on a resort it requires a 14 day quarantine before they can attend, and then NY at this time requires a quarantine which for our guests who work or have prior priorities makes it very difficult. We are working through other financial cost analysis- right now it’s a lot of money that is lost not even including what we already lost for the prior invites/ favors etc. The venue would require over another $20k for the 3 day that wouldn’t include the makeup artist, hair, photo/video, catering etc it’s just way out of our budget. Does anyone know sites or anything for brides looking for a destination wedding?

Why are they unable to host your wedding party? Is the venue closed down right now?

View Quoted Comment

Where is the destination?

It’s a mess... our international destination wedding was supposed to be in May. 50 guests completely booked. Well, we canceled the wedding the last week in March and the first week in April the island actually closed and all flights stopped to the island until July… I had to fight with the AAA travel agency because they wanted to give our guests vouchers for future travel. Mind you, the trip was between $4K-8K depending on how many nights they were staying. AAA was so proud they were offering no cancellation fees. My background has a little law and I dug out the legalities and a week later, all 50 guests had received full refunds in original payment form. As far is the resort, they offered to transfer the $1000 deposit to a future date… But we ended up doing a destination wedding last month in the states. So we did lose that money and there really is nothing we can do about that. A lot of venues are being quite shady during these times and it’s disgusting.