Tom Stieghorst
I was eating dinner on the outdoor patio of a St. Augustine restaurant recently when a stream of young women emerged from indoors. They just kept coming. And coming. Like a never-ending conga line. All wore T-shirts with "Deanne's Wedding" splashed across the front.
I've seen similar groups around the world, from Barcelona to Indonesia. What struck me however, beyond the endless queue, was that this was not during springtime but two weeks before Halloween. This wedding was out of season. And it dawned on me that an awful lot of Florida weddings that were scheduled for June have been postponed until fall because of the pandemic.
I called one of the premier wedding venues in town to see if I was on target. "A lot of them have shifted to the fall, the winter and into next year," confirmed Joni Barkley, director of sales and catering for the romantic Casa Monica Resort & Spa in St. Augustine.
Similarly, at Gulf Beach Weddings, "I'm definitely seeing a lot of that," said Jeff Roe, a wedding coordinator for the St. Petersburg-based wedding planner. Roe said that more than 300 weddings scheduled with the firm at the start of 2020 had been canceled, delayed or postponed.
The business was virtually shut down in March and April because all of the beaches in Florida were closed to block the spread of Covid-19. The nonessential lockdown in many Florida counties also meant most hotels were off limits for receptions.
So brides began eyeing dates in the fall, which at the time seemed to be the first window of likely safety for wedding events.
The timing of Covid's arrival was particularly tough for Gulf Beach Weddings, which operates not only in the Sarasota-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area but also from Panama City, Fla., to Gulf Shores, Ala., along the Florida Panhandle. In the colder winter months there are far fewer weddings on the schedule, Roe said, and the seasonal upturn in March was torpedoed by the pandemic.
At the Don CeSar, the celebrated resort on St. Petersburg Beach where three to five weddings a weekend are not uncommon, the nuptials resumed in June and have been going strong, associate director of marketing Kayla Gordon said.
The Don CeSar hotel on St. Petersburg Beach will often host three to five weddings on a weekend.
"We have many clients that we were planning to host in early 2020 that have moved to fall 2020 as well as 2021. Some were booked with us originally, and some were booked at international destinations and cruises and now plan to stay in Florida on the beach," Gordon said.
Covid has affected weddings in another way: they've shrunk.
"Most couples are unfortunately seeing less-than-expected attendance, based on their family and friends being restricted or concerned with coming from other states," Gordon said. "Air travel remains the biggest challenge for most potential wedding guests; as a result, we are seeing more drive-in guests than in the past."
And Florida weddings remain popular. Even though it is cooler in the winter months, it is far less frigid than in most U.S. locations.
"St. Augustine is really a huge, huge destination for weddings now," said Barkley, of the Casa Monica. "On any given weekend you'll see five or six weddings going on around town."
"It really is quite amazing, especially for such a small town," Barkley said.