East Coast Brides with Late Aug/september weddings - anyone postponing yet? Planners, any advice?

I’m so happy this is here!! I, as well as many of you, have change my 5/30/20 wedding to 8/15/20. I’m very concerned about doing things too early, but hope things will be better by then. If not, I am planning to have a small church ceremony of about 50 people and then the reception next year. Hoping this won’t be the case!!! Good luck to everyone and know you’re not alone.

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Good point Kari! To be honest, the reason our guest list is as high as it is is because of a lot of my fiancee's family - these are people that we personally do not have a problem cutting off the list, but my fiancee's parents are helping us a good bit to pay for it so I imagine they would want us to cut the list elsewhere - which would mean cutting my (much smaller) list of family or our fairly large list of friends, and I don't think we'd want to do that.

Our reception is in a tent which can either be open-air or enclosed with AC. The ceremony is outside. Cocktail hour will be in a manor house leading into the tent though but I'm sure they could probably move those elsewhere need-be. My other concern for food is that we paid for buffet-style food, so I'm unsure how sanitary that would be right now and hope that they wouldn't force us to pay extra for plated dinners instead...

I guess I would say our priorities are around my family and our friends being able to make it, and for everyone overall to have a good time without feeling like they'd be risking their health to do so. Date isn't super important and we'd be willing to wait to assure our priorities, it would just be annoying to have enough time in between to forget a bunch of planning details and then have to go back in a year to finish things up, but c'est la vie.

One other plus to postponing though is that we were hoping to honeymoon in Greece - if we keep our current date I don't think we'd be able to do that right away. It's not a big plus but a plus all the same.

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As Kari just said, having a reduced guest list plan is a good idea! A guest list of 50 people would be much more likely to be able to happen. Best of luck to you

Update: My venue got back to me and we are able to move our date up to 9 months out no fees, no questions asked. Anything outside of that though on a prime date (so for me that's Saturdays in June, September and October I think) we have to pay a 10% fee...

My fiancee and I are leaning towards postponing to September 2021 and eating the fee. We're hopeful this would be far enough out that our vendors would have availability, and experts are hopeful that we will have a vaccine around June of 2021 so theoretically we would be able to have a more "normal" wedding.

One plus is that all of my vendors are super flexible and willing to move the date for no fee as long as they are available - if not they can help us find someone else. My photographer even said if she's not free, she'll send another photographer in her place and do the editing for us.

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Yea, it's so hard. Our wedding was scheduled for May 30th in New Hampshire with 80 guests which looks very unlikely. We are waiting for an announcement from our governor today to see what restrictions will be going forward and if it will even be possible to do a small elopement with our parents and a photographer by the end of the month. Realistically we are worried our wedding wouldn't be possible at all this year (or possibly even next year), so we are just hoping we can get married soon, keep our jobs, ride out this pandemic still employed and healthy, and then have an event similar to the wedding we planned sometime in 2021 or 2022. Our parents are older and we really want to keep them safe, and my family and some friends are from NJ so we don't know when will be good for them to travel again. I've been grieving about our wedding for the past month and am finally in a place where I've started to accept the drastic changes. But it's so sad and so disappointing and so hard. I hope you can have a magical wedding day with whatever you decide!

View Quoted Comment That’s awesome! I’m sure it makes you feel much better. Did you say anything in particular to your venue to allow the change? I know we’re both getting married in Maryland so I’m curious. I’m going to give my venue a call again sometime next week to see if they have made decisions.

I am September 17, 2020 (I chose a Thursday wedding to begin with) in Central NJ. We have about 100 expected guests. For now we are waiting to make our decision. I feel so guilty still holding on. My fiancé thinks to postpone, his family wants us to hold out. We have a lot of high risks guests, so I do think it may be better to postpone. Since our venue charged us based around the guest list, I’m hoping if we need to cut down the list due to the unknown guidelines
for September weddings, I hope I can get money back. However, I already sent out the save the dates to the 100 guests and would feel bad if I do have to say they can no longer come to the wedding. So we would probably postpone all together.

Right now planning wise I’m trying to plan the hotel block, buy my shoes, and pick the song for the video. We also have been practicing our first dance. We had all of the major things booked already before the lock down, so now we are doing the little things.
I’m thinking of all the brides out there!!

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No I didn't say anything in particular - I just emailed them saying that we are considering postponing and asking what their current policy is. I'm sorry your vendor isn't being flexible - to be honest, that's not really good business for them at this point - I would be sure to review them and mention this. Every bride is in a different situation right now and should be allowed to postpone if that is what makes them comfortable. Sorry you have to deal with that! I hope that in the future there will be laws in place to make these things easier in the future should this happen again.

After a few days of deliberation and talking with family, we have decided to go ahead and postpone. We've been fortunate with having a venue and vendors that are flexible.

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I totally feel you - it seems to me that there's not really great info out there right now to advise on what the best thing to do is right now. Ultimately, we decided to postpone, hopefully to September 2021, but we'll see. We really just wanted our guests to not be prohibited from coming in any way, whether that be because of the virus or financial reasons (flights could get very expensive for example).

When you get a contract for your hotel block - I'm sure you guys are already doing this but I would make sure to look at it thoroughly and make sure you know what would happen should you have to postpone. I just emailed my hotel right now to see what we need to do - fortunately, ours was a "courtesy" block, meaning that we're not on the hook for a specific amount of rooms being booked, so I'm hopeful we can just move the date of the block? But we'll see. I'm pretty sure anyone who's already booked can cancel for no fee right now, but I asked about that and also if there was any way their reservation could just be moved to the new date without fees - we'll see.

I was in the process of getting a florist when all of this hit - we decided that we want them regardless, so we just asked on their postponement policy before signing anything.

So I wanted to share some interesting information, especially with those of you in Maryland. If you read Hogan's Roadmap to Recovery he gave tentative dates for each phase

Phase 1: Could start on May 15, 2020 and end on September 2, 2020

Phase 2: Could start on September 3, 2020 and end on December 31, 2020

Phase 3: Could start on January 1, 2021

It's worth reading through! If these tentative dates hold, summer weddings look out of the question .

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This makes me feel a lot better about postponing my wedding. Could you share the article where you saw those tentative dates?

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Absolutely! I'm hoping when I talk to my venue about this in more detail they let me postpone or cancel, fingers crossed!

https://www.eyeonannapolis.net/2020/05/governor-hogans-update-on-covid-19-response-go-boating-and-golfing/

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Thanks Kenzie - my fingers are crossed for you too!

We're waiting on contracts but our new date is September 18, 2021. There are still quite a few dates open right now in 2021!

Thanks for posting this. Our date is 9/4/2020 in Frederick with 160. We’ve been together for 14 years so our family has not so patiently been waiting for this. Most guests are local and we have about 30% high risk.


We’re so torn on what to do, especially after seeing those tentative dates! Our venue hasn’t responded to our last email sent 3 weeks ago, which I assume is because they’re tending to sooner brides but this is all so nerve wracking and depressing.
We’ve decided to wait until July but since the same date next year is a Saturday, I’m so concerned about losing that too. A running theme through tour whole relationship has been the numbers 4 and 32. (3+2+4=9, 4, (2+0+2+0=4) so our date was perfect.
AND We can only choose dates between June and September since his two best men are 1. in the NBA and 2. coach college basketball 🤦🏽‍♀️
Ahhhhhhhhh. Sorry to unload. I don’t feel comfortable talking about all this with people who aren’t going through this too so WeddingWire it is lol

Hi Laura!


Our wedding is scheduled for 09/19/20, and our venue said that they are not planning on canceling or postponing at the moment. However, IF something did happen closer to the date and THEY couldn't be open for the wedding, then they wouldn't leave us hanging and we could reschedule our wedding within 6 months. They are a big company so they said that if they didn't accommodate the affected weddings ASAP, they would get in a lot of trouble. I still have a plan B just in case to get married that day regardless (FH's ring has our date engraved on it 😅🤦🏼‍♀️)

One of the main reasons we are still moving forward is because our venue won't refund the money if we cancel. If we postpone on our own, we have to pay a new deposit and we already have the whole venue paid off 😪