2 weeks Ago
Misty Coolidge and her 9-year-old daughter, Eva, hold letters March 13 that spell “love” at the Coolidge Family Farm in New Gloucester. Coolidge says that at the same time she is hearing about the opening of new wedding venues, she is hearing about established owners worried about going out of business. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal NEW GLOUCESTER — With the height of wedding season still months away, industry insiders say the growth of wedding venues over the years, coupled with an increasingly tight economy, means that for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, Maine’s many venues feel like they’re being left at the altar.
Weddings are a $1 billion-a-year industry in Maine. About 10,000 weddings are held every year in Maine, depending on who you ask. The Wedding Report , a research group that collects and provides wedding data to industry professionals, puts the 2023 figure at 10,352.
The number of venues to host wedding events is more elusive. The state does not track wedding data specifically and there are no requirements to register a venue in Maine, making it very difficult to be exact. The best estimates put the number of wedding venues in Maine at more than 300.
But industry insiders say there is a glut of venues that is threatening the very existence of some places after several years of healthy rebound from the pandemic. “I hear of a new venue opening almost every week,” Misty Coolidge, owner of Coolidge Family Farm in New Gloucester, said. “And those that are in existence right now, our numbers (of bookings) have dropped drastically.
” Coolidge said she has 10 to 11 weddings booked for 2025 so far, when she normally has more than 30. She said inquiries have remained steady in recent years, but there are simply more venues popping up. Two years ago she contacted the state trying to quantify the number of new venues.
“There were 27 new certificates of occupancy that the state had issued, 25 of them were (wedding) barns,” she was told. But because there are no state wedding venue registration requirements, Coolidge said those numbers could be four times higher. Some people have been pulling money out of retirement or other savings to buy and refurbish barns, in particular, for weddings — partly because they have been hugely popular and there are plenty of them in Maine.
But Coolidge said the imbalance in the ratio of venues to weddings is even setting established venue owners up for failure. “They’re going to struggle to pay their bills ..
. Some of them are going to close,” she said. “I’ve heard of two or three venues closing and canceling their contracts with their couples, saying too bad, so sad.
The market is saturated.” Maine’s wedding industry was all but shut down in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic. The state put out specific guidelines for the industry in 2021, limiting gatherings to 50 people.
Unknowns about the virus and concerns of mass infections prompted most couples to cancel or postpone their weddings, and everything came to a screeching halt. “I lost $200,000 in 2020,” Coolidge said. “I had to take out a loan for that money; $200,000 I borrowed from (Economic Injury Disaster Loan) to support my family, to continue paying my bills, to pay my five mortgages.
It was hard on my couples. There was a lot of tears.” Despite her losses, Coolidge, who is president of the National Association of Catering and Events in Maine, said she managed to complete eight weddings in 2020.
She originally had 32 booked. Coolidge has been associated with the wedding industry since she was a child — her mother owned a bridal shop in Waterville. She’s also an officiant in Maine and has been marrying couples for 30 years.
She said she’s seen a proliferation of wedding barn venues in the past few years. Owner Misty Coolidge opens the barn door March 13 at the Coolidge Family Farm in New Gloucester. She says there are too many venues competing for wedding dollars.
Daryn Slover/Sun Journal “We’re seeing a lot of people that want to open their own venue because they’ve got a family barn, they have a family field or they can buy land inexpensively,” she said. “They’re looking into venue ownership because they feel it’s going to be easy and fun.” And hopefully lucrative.
With the passing of the pandemic, weddings went into high gear and venues were soon in short supply with bookings stretching out not just months but years. Owners of venues that didn’t close in 2020 spent the next three years catching up on all the money lost during the pandemic. And new venues came online with owners hoping to take advantage of the swell of demand.
Olivia and Blake Laliberte of Minot are among the new owners of a wedding venue. So new, they haven’t yet hosted a wedding at their Arbella Acres in Minot. Their barn is still undergoing renovations, but they have their first wedding booked for later in the summer, and they told the Sun Journal earlier this month they are happy so far with the number of wedding inquiries they’re getting.
Another is Collin Spillane, owner of Golden Pine Farm in Livermore Falls. Spillane purchased his barn at the height of the pandemic in 2021 and has spent several years improving it, adding six bathrooms, a new septic system, a well, fire barriers and a bar, and updating the rooms in the property’s farmhouse. Spillane, who worked with venue operators and wedding planners in the wedding industry for about 15 years as a DJ, said that among his time-consuming challenges has been getting an entertainment-dance license that is required for venues like his.
It requires an inspection from one of the state’s seven or so inspectors from the Office of State Fire Marshal . Industry insiders said some venue owners are forgoing that process, and that the risk of getting caught is pretty low. Spillane said it takes time to market a new venue and get established, and his weddings coming up this year were contracted two years ago.
So far, Spillane said, he’s seeing fewer bookings and more cancellations as couples opt for a field ceremony or none at all due to a tightening economy. “Times they are a-changing,” he said. “Things are tight and people are spending less.
” Indeed, while the data can vary wildly, The Wedding Report calculated the median wedding cost in Maine at $14,223, while another industry source, TheKnot.com, puts the average nationally at $33,000. The only economic study of Maine’s wedding industry, in 2017, put the average spending for a wedding at $26,780.
Such costs at a time when consumer spending is shrinking for the first time since the pandemic, and more people are worried about the economy, have wedding venue operators worried they’re in for a one-two punch. The only economic impact study completed to date on Maine’s wedding industry’s impact on the state’s economy, done in 2017, provided an ominous message. Prepared by the Maine Center of Business and Economic Research at the University of Southern Maine for the Maine Wedding Report, it cited low barriers to enter the wedding industry in Maine.
The 2018 revised report concluded, “increasing competition has squeezed profit for many operators across the industry as some industry components are at risk of saturation.” Eva Coolidge walks down the barn steps March 13 at the Coolidge Family farm in New Gloucester. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal While the pandemic turned things upside down two years later, the revitalized industry appears to now be at even greater risk of saturation given the increase in venues since the pandemic.
Coolidge is not alone in sounding the alarm. Christine Parker, the publisher of Real Maine Weddings Magazine, said she has heard from vendors of all kinds that “clients in certain areas are scrambling to find services because there aren’t enough to meet the new demand, even though many venues still have available dates.” It may be too late for most wedding venue owners to do much more than hang on at this point, but Coolidge said education may help others who are thinking about opening a wedding venue.
“Call somebody that has a venue with 10 years experience. Sit down and have coffee with them,” she said. “I probably had eight or nine conversations with people that are thinking about doing this that have called me, ‘Let’s have coffee.
'” She said they need to hear the realities of venue ownership. “People are destroying my property on weekends — I have things stolen, I have people telling me off, I have dog bites, I have fire,” Coolidge said. “You should know what you’re getting into is my point, it’s not just fun.
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