Weddings are picking up post-pandemic — but have venues fully recovered?

After a lull during the COVID-19 pandemic, wedding numbers and size are picking up again in Canada, but many businesses are struggling to keep their doors open, planners say.

Wedding planning can be stressful as it is, but a last-minute cancellation by a venue or vendor can only make those pre-nuptial jitters even worse.

Couples in Ottawa got a shock this week after Courtyard Restaurant, a popular downtown eatery and wedding venue in the heart of the country’s capital, announced on social media that it was shutting down for good after more than 40 years.

Many couples who had their wedding booked at the location were informed by the restaurant in an email that Tuesday was their last evening of service and all future weddings were cancelled.

“It was definitely very surprising news as a consumer and as a resident of Ottawa, but also then as a wedding planner,” said Shannon Kennedy, owner and principal planner of Kennedy Event Planning, an Ottawa-based wedding planning agency.

It can be a nerve-wracking situation for soon-to-be married couples, as they look for other options and figure out how to salvage their big day.

“Weddings in general have a lot of stress and emotion already built into them, but when you’re presented with a crisis like this within less than 24 hours, emotions run high, crises run high,” Kennedy said.

“And so as wedding vendors in a wedding community, we are kind of trained to approach things as calmly as we can and as rationally as we can,” she told Global News.

Kennedy said the local wedding community in Ottawa, which has become so accustomed to last-minute changes as a result of surviving the COVID-19 era, rallied very quickly, with vendors reaching out to clients affected by the Courtyard closure and sharing their own availabilities.