Weddings in Hawaii rebounding after COVID slowdown

After putting off plans for a 2020 wedding as COVID-19 raged across the country, former Hawaii residents Rhonda Aoki, 32, and Jason Tran, 33, rescheduled their nuptials for this year and sent “save the date” cards to family and friends for Jan. 29 at the Waialae Country Club.

Next came “change the date” notices to their guests as the couple, who live in San Jose, Calif., feared a resurgence of corona­virus infections.

“We booked vendors for that date and then we were worried about a post-holiday spike, and so in September we realized we had to make a decision to go or no-go and decided to postpone until May 28,” said Aoki, a cancer researcher from Aiea.

With one week to go before their big day, the guest list has dropped from 250 to 150 because some people, especially older family members, aren’t comfortable yet attending indoor gatherings, according to Tran.

The couple’s experience is not unique, as weddings that were postponed, rescheduled and then postponed again when the delta variant emerged late last summer are back on the calendar after Hawaii lifted the last of its pandemic- related restrictions in March.

Now marriage is on the rise. In the first quarter of 2022, the state Department of Health recorded 4,466 marriages, up 54% from 2,908 in the same three months of 2021, according to preliminary data, and not too far off from the 4,661 marriages in the first quarter of 2020, before the pandemic hit.

Not all marriages entail a wedding, but the sudden rush to the altar has local wedding planners scrambling to accommodate rebookings as well as new clients.

In the past week alone, Maui-based A White Orchid Wedding handled 10 to 12 weddings statewide, according to Carolee Higashino, who started the business in 1991.

“We’ve definitely been experiencing a huge influx and a lot of these are rebookings and some are triple rebookings, so what’s happened is that they’ve sort of collided, so several of the old bookings merged with new bookings,” she said.

The new bookings include smaller groups and elopements — “people literally running away and saying, ‘Let’s do this thing,’ and they’ve been waiting a couple years,” Higashino said. “They may not have intended it for Hawaii but now they’re like, ‘Let’s just elope and run away.’ They got tired of planning this big wedding at home, and that sort of thing.”

DOH recorded an average of 1,554 marriages a month in the first quarter of 2020, before COVID-19 took hold. In April 2020, when the state was virtually shut down, only 291 occurred. The year ended with a total of 10,446 marriages statewide, down 48% from the 20,057 in 2019.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that Hawaii saw the nation’s largest drop in marriage rates in 2020, from 14.2 marriages per 1,000 residents in 2019 to 7.4 in 2020 — a 48% plunge. That’s not exactly surprising since the marriage rate in Hawaii has been on a general decline since 2005, when the rate was 22.6, but also because of the COVID-19 travel restrictions placed on visitors, who make up a sizeable chunk of the marriages taking place in Hawaii.

According to DOH data, couples from out of state accounted for 62% of marriages in 2019, and as much as 85% in Maui County and 86% on Kauai.

Joseph Esser, president of the Oahu Wedding Association, said Hawaii is the second-most desirable spot for destination weddings behind Las Vegas. With Hawaii weddings costing an average of $35,934 last year, according to the research company The Wedding Report, the trade is lucrative for the state because it brings in large, big-spending groups who generally stay for as long as a week, spreading their dollars throughout the economy.

After the disaster that was 2020, Esser described 2021 as “a roller coaster.” Just when it looked like the state was emerging from the throes of COVID-19, the delta variant surge led to another shutdown for much of the second half of the year, he said.

“A lot of those weddings were postponed multiple times. It was a chaotic year and a half,” said Esser, who owns Joseph Esser Photo­graphy.

Delta was followed by the omicron variant, throwing wedding plans into further disarray and creating more uncertainty among couples hoping to finally tie the knot. Wedding planner Tessa Gomes, owner of Fred and Kate Events in Honolulu, said the second lockdown in 2021 had even more of an impact on couples and wedding professionals.

“When we had the first shutdown we went from nonstop weddings to nonstop rescheduling,” Gomes said. “Last year it started to pick up and then we had that second lockdown and that’s when things got really hard again because people who felt confident that we were reopening realized that now the state or the city can shut us down without any warning — it was given and then taken away.

“At that point there was some hesitation and that’s when I got more cancellations because of the feeling Hawaii is not going to be able to manage this.”

Esser said the wedding industry started to rebound again in February, albeit with a few hiccups.

“We had a destination wedding at Kualoa Ranch but half of the guests got omicron and couldn’t come, so there was still uncertainty with travel and a lot of restrictions. But now that the restrictions have lifted, it’s a much more stable business,” he said.

“There’s definitely been a surge of new clients who have been on the fence about whether they are going to do their wedding or not, but also you have this year-and-a-half bottlenecking effect that everyone who waited so they could have that big event where they would have family and friends, and where it was going to be safe for them, a lot of those dates are from 2020. So it’s not necessarily new business but it’s filling up the calendar,” Esser said.

Even still, he added, “A lot of the industry suffered such a major blow it’s probably going to take a number of years to get back to where we were.”

Higashino said some markets including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and, more importantly, Japan have yet to return, but that her business is seeing more clients from the East Coast “who don’t want to go out of the country now” because of the war in Ukraine or other health and safety factors.

Wedding planners also said they are seeing more elaborate affairs, since during the first two years of the pandemic many couples were able to cut expenses by working from home and sock away more savings to lavish on their nuptials.

“We’re seeing more hefty budgets; couples are not holding back,” Higashino said. “In fact, they’re going a little more all-out but with fewer people.”

Gomes, who was busy last week rescheduling 10 weddings, also is fielding more requests for smaller events but for different reasons.

“People have been doing smaller weddings because during the last two years couples managed to find what’s really important and what they need to do,” she said. “A lot them are unsure about budgets and may have lost their jobs, so a lot of the weddings are smaller and more intimate.”

And with lingering concerns about indoor gatherings, outdoor weddings are gaining in popularity, according to Gomes, even for local couples “who like being in ballrooms but now because of the pandemic they feel it’s safer outdoors, especially for kupuna.”

With weddings seemingly back on track, planners said the industry is facing a new set of challenges, including escalating hotel rates and air fares, stiff competition for venues, staffing shortages among subcontractors, supply chain issues with vendors and much higher costs due to inflation.

After months of frustration and disappointment, Aoki said it was “a little bit of a bummer” that planning their “once-in-a-lifetime” event turned out to be so stressful.

“We really only started getting excited in last two months — ‘Well, OK, it’s actually going to happen,’” she said.

The couple credited Gomes, their wedding planner, for keeping them on track and putting the delays in perspective.

“Having that extra time gave us the hope of being able to have all of our family and friends at our wedding,” said Tran, an aircraft mechanic who hails from Kaimuki.

Ashley and Spencer Ishikawa Jr. of Wailuku took a different path to the altar. The high school sweethearts, who met as boarders at Lahainaluna High School, postponed their wedding in July 2019 when Ashley, 28, became pregnant with their second child.

“We’ve been been together a long time and I didn’t want to be pregnant and get married. I was like, ‘I can wait one more year, I’ve waited all this time’ — and then COVID happened,” she recalled.

Their second son, ‘Ehiku, was born in October 2019, and the couple set a new wedding date for May 2, 2020. The very day after her bridal shower in March 2020, the state went into lockdown. Since they already had a marriage license and were in the process of buying a new home, the couple decided to wed in a simple outdoor ceremony on family property in Kahakuloa on May 15, 2020, with just their parents present.

“We had already put deposits toward venues and photography because we had already started the planning in 2019. We just kept pushing it back and at that point we were ready to just take the loss because I just had another baby and life was moving on for us,” Ishikawa said.

Her mother-in-law, Jacqueline Ishikawa, an event coordinator for A White Orchid Wedding, encouraged the couple not to give up on a formal ceremony, and on May 15, their second wedding anniversary, they renewed their vows at Hui No‘eau Visual Arts Center in Makawao in the presence of 60 guests, including their sons Spencer III, age 5, ‘Ehiku, now 2, and ‘Umi, who was born in February.

“I was ready to give it all up; I don’t even care already,” Ishikawa said. “But now that we did it, I’m definitely happy that we did. It’s a memory that’s going to last forever. Our three children were there and we got to celebrate our love.”