Many wedding experts predict an extremely high wedding activity in 2022. After two years of crisis and stagnation, the wedding business comes to life – about 2.5 million weddings are planned for 2022 only in the US. So, a lot of people scream, Book your vendors asap, or Give vendors huge deposits to secure your date, etc. But is the situation really that bad? Should you grab wedding vendors like your life depends on it? Let’s try to figure out the optimal wedding planning route for 2022.
First of all, to understand the situation, let’s find out how much the wedding market is expected to grow in the next year. What the exact numbers are? It is predicted that the number of weddings in 2022 will grow to 2.5 million only in the United States of America. This number seems frighteningly large. Especially when we look at 2.02 million weddings in 2019 and 1.2 million weddings in 2020. The market will double in 2022. But if we don’t take into the account the pandemic 2020 year, we will see that the average number of weddings in America is about 2-2.4 million a year. Not so dramatic, isn’t it? To conclude everything, the number of weddings will increase 25% max in 2022. So, don’t panic and definitely don’t rush your wedding planning.
By June 2021, over 80% of interviewed couples had no problems with booking or buying whatever they wanted for their wedding. Even if the number decreased for the last few months, it is still high. It means that there are no actual problems caused by the so-called 2022 wedding boom. So, forget about paying extra to potential vendors to secure your date or rushing to book any available date, even if it doesn’t suit you. Some people, especially unreliable vendors, might be a bit overdramatic about the situation we have right now, but that’s because there is an obvious benefit for them.
Still, there is a but in all this situation. You might have some problems with booking the venue, date, or vendor you like, but it probably won’t be as dramatic as you think. At the same time, the more real issue for 2022 weddings will be the wedding budget. Many people in the wedding business lost a lot of money in 2020-2021 because of the stagnation connected to coronavirus pandemic. Weddings were canceled or simplified, vendors didn’t get their money, venues lost dozens of clients, and so on. With the revival of the wedding business, the companies and private vendors might want to overlap the losses, to earn much more than they usually do a year. And this means that the prices will most probably rise.
How much will the prices on the wedding market grow? It is too soon yet to tell, but wedding experts don’t think the increase will be dramatic. Anyhow, the vendors will want to make money, not scare the potential clients away with high prices. But the average wedding budget will probably grow $1,000-2,000 in 2022. This isn’t such a big change, but you have to be ready to pay more for your wedding if you want it to happen next year. At the same time, you should note that most companies (in any area actually) raise their prices every year, it’s normal and a common thing.
Also, the good news is, we will likely return to pre-pandemic numbers of weddings and spendings after 2023 (after the agiotage is over). So, if your wedding is still years away, keep calm, the situation will normalize until then.
We’d like to mention that some of the numbers mentioned in this article we got from the 2021 Covid-19 Wedding Market Update. You can easily find it online. This report is dated June 2021, so the numbers might have changed since then, but the general picture most probably remained the same.
