Downsizing: how have your venues responded to lower guests than your min?

The venue can't go past its 30% capacity of guests/vendors count. The contract is based on the min. count as I had seen for ours too. If we had gone lower than we had, we would have to pay the extra cost to cover the total, which didn't seem feasible. Your better to postpone for a later date and have an Anniversary party if you still decide to get married on your original date with immediate family and friends.

I don't understand minimum guest counts. Most venues I've spoken to (and the two that I'm dealing with) have a minimum spend, rather than guest count. Maybe it's because we have customizable menus. But for me I've just added a bunch more food and booze so that my smaller wedding hits the minimum spend. It's working out to about $190 pp, which is pricey, but the total is what I budgeted with the larger group. Can you ask about a minimum spend rather than guest count? I've just added a few more hors d'oeuvres, and extra course for dinner, and a larger consumption bar (which will essentially work out to an open bar).

Our venue has said they are waiving any minimum spend should restrictions make it that we can't have the event as specified in our contract.

By the way, they can't just force you to pay for a certain number without providing you the service for it. And you can also report them to the province for price gouging.

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The 30% only applies to ceremonies.

We recently inquired with our Toronto venue about this very thing. In 2019 we originally agreed to 120 min guests for September 2020. We postponed to June 13 2021 and don't want to postpone again. We asked the venue about having a more covid safe/realistic 30-60 people but they said it wouldn't cover their operational costs, and we will end up paying more than our originally agreed upon $113 per plate to make up for that. They said they did pricing for a similar inquiries.. $400/plate for 20 people, or $1000/plate for 4 guests... Lol. Thankfully they realize how ludicrous that is and said if we prefer to cancel (as those couples did) they will give back our deposit. With a possible 3rd wave on the horizon we are probably gonna just cancel and do a simple backyard ceremony instead. It's been so stressful trying to figure out what to do though!

Sorry I figured I would attach the screenshots with the information.

For indoor weddings you can only have 30% in all stages but lockdown I believe. In red and orange you can have 4 people per table and yellow and green I believe is 6.


At my venue in the room we chose, our max guest count could be 80 before covid. That would only allow us to have 24 people. Then all the tables have to be 6 feet apart. So we could only have 5 tables. We would then have to pay our room rental fee on top of paying for the individual plates. We would only be allowed 20 to 24 guests.
Hopefully my math word problem can help you figure out how many you can have.

My fiance and I are lucky enough that we don't have a min number of guests required but we're in BC so things are a little bit different here.

Your venue might change their mind when it gets closer to your date? Since restrictions keep on changing weekly and nobody really knows what's going to happen in the next few months

I cant change the agreement this far out. However, if at the time of the event we are only allowed 50 people indoors I only pay for 50 people indoors. I have an 80 person minimum as well. If at the time of our wedding we are allowed the full 80 I'll have to pay for the full 80. Could it be they are waiting till closer to make sure? With the vaccine coming out no one really knows what weddings will be like this summer.