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\nIn March of 2020, Caitlin Corsetti Luscre, 31, was in the final stages of planning her destination wedding. “We both have Italian heritage, so Italy made sense,” she told InStyle<\/em><\/a> two years ago. At the time, she was in a wait-and-see pattern with her Italian planner, crossing her fingers that her June 2020 wedding would still be able to happen. “It’s funny to think about how optimistic we were back then,” she says now.\n<\/p>\n \nShe and her now-husband, Nicholas Luscre, 32, postponed until the following year. But because of rising Covid cases a few weeks before their second date, in June 2021, Italy imposed restrictions, and the venue called to let Corsetti Luscre know that they were closing. She wound up canceling her Italian wedding completely.\n<\/p>\n \nWhen InStyle<\/em>‘s executive producer Justine Del Gaudio planned her engagement party in 2020, she set the date for Pi Day, 3.14. “We loved the idea that it was a theme for both of us \u2014 dessert for me and math for my smarty-pants fianc\u00e9,” she jokes (he works in sports analytics). But the pie party wouldn’t happen, and when the pair were finally able to get married this month, the date itself came down to whenever and wherever it would be possible. Del Gaudio says they looked at 20 venues, and even went into contract on two that fell through due to overbooking or miscommunication, before they landed a gorgeous affair at the Hotel Del Coronado<\/a> in California.\n<\/p>\n \nYour wedding date becomes your anniversary, and sentimental folks (like the kind who plan a pie-themed engagement party) can try to choose carefully. Covid-era couples don’t always have that luxury. “We would’ve taken anything a venue had,” Del Gaudio says.\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \nAs a wedding boom erupts across the United States, dominating many social calendars for the season, stories like these represent a trend among couples who tried to get married at any point in the last two years only to face closures, cancellations, or at the very least a long engagement and lots of uncertainty. And vendors and venues attempted to weather a storm that effectively shut down their industry outright, as many predicted it would when we spoke to them in 2020. At the time, they worried about making their next month’s bills. Now, the wedding industry looks a lot leaner than it did then, and vendors who managed to stay in business find themselves busier than ever \u2014 and they’re raising prices to meet demand.\n<\/p>\n \nAccording to data released by The Wedding Report and published by CNBC last week, couples in the U.S. are expected to host 2.5 million weddings in 2022, a 30% increase<\/a> over 2021 and the most in any year since 1982. And they’re spending more, too: The average couple spent just over $20K on their wedding in 2020 (admittedly smaller affairs that year) which increased to $27K in 2021. Anecdotally, brides and vendors alike are reporting bigger tickets across the board in 2022.\n<\/p>\n
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