Vendor Flexibility

My advice would be to contact your vendors ASAP (like yesterday for a March wedding lol), don't wait until your payment is due or it might be too late to make changes.

All of my vendors have thankfully been working with me since my guest count was cut from 120 to 65. For my flowers, I can make changes up to 3 weeks before, then the price is locked in. So I was able to remove centerpieces for the tables I'm no longer using. For the bakery I'm getting my cake from, if you reduce your guest count at least 30 days before, they'll give you a credit. I called them to reduce my guest count 5 months before and was able to talk them into giving me a refund instead of a credit since it was so far out.

Our photographer is very flexible and understandable. Our original package included photography, videography, & an inflatable photo booth. Because we downsized our wedding and switched venues, our photographer agreed that we could take the photo booth out of the contract and decrease the cost.


Our new venue definitely worked with us as well. Instead of the $1200 rental rate she gave us a deal of only $800 with $50 of that being refundable for cleaning but that includes the venue, a DOC, photo booth and servers. My husband and I haven't had a problem planning for our big wedding.

All of our vendors are per head! With the exception of photographer, venue, coordinator, dj, things like that. Our food and alcohol caterer is totally per person. We paid them a deposit based on the headcount we were thinking we'd have. But in our contract, it's written that we will pay them a total of the amount of guests we will have - meaning if we pay them over time for 200 people, and then end up having 70 for our final count, they refund us the difference.

I would just make sure you have a COVID plan with all of your vendors when booking! Just see what the plan will be if worst comes to worst, or you have to downsize!

Also for reference, we changed our wedding date and venue after we'd booked our photographer and caterer. They both let us change without an additional charge as long as they had the new date open. I would also double check what a fee would be for postponing if you had to!!

Definitely contact your venue ASAP. On our contract it said we needed to make any changes 60-90 days before the wedding if not there would be extra fees charged to us. Luckily we called before and was able to downsize our guests from 65 to less that 20. I’m sure your venue will be flexible especially during these crazy times. Just try giving them a call and ask what your options are!


Hope it works out for you!