Nina Bhayana and Eric Kormos initially wanted to get married in November, but were forced to postpone until March, 2025, when they realized that Taylor Swift’s concert dates in Toronto meant that hotels had no availability for their guests from out of town.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
When Nina Bhayana and Eric Kormos got engaged last year, they knew they didn’t want to wait long to get married. Then Taylor Swift got in the way.
The wedding dates that worked best for the Toronto couple and their families, many members of whom live out of town, were Nov. 16 and 23. “We initially thought that would be perfect – it’ll be nice in the city, not too busy,” says Bhayana, the vice-president of operations for a natural skin-care company.
But as she and Kormos began narrowing down venues for those dates, their planner, Iris Li, gave them a warning: Hotels could be impossible to come by because Swift’s Eras Tour would be in town. When the couple tried to secure a discounted block of rooms for their families and friends at the hotel they hoped to host the big day, Li’s suspicion was confirmed: There weren’t enough rooms available.
It would be a long engagement after all. They tore up their plans and booked their wedding for this March. “It never occurred to me that any artist would have such a large impact on the city,” Bhayana says. “It’s really incredible that one artist was able to do this.”
Swift’s two-week, six-concert residency at the Rogers Centre this month is set to transform the city, with fans expected to clog Toronto’s streets, restaurants and, as brides and grooms begrudgingly learned these past few months, hotels. The rising expense of weddings has in recent years been pushing more of the celebrations later into the calendar year, but in Toronto, in 2024, Swifties have managed to make November a pain for engaged couples, too.
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Hotels, possibly fearful of being cast as price-gouging villains at such a high-profile time, are coy about this phenomenon. The Globe and Mail contacted representatives for more than a dozen hotels in Toronto and Vancouver, where Swift will also perform the first weekend of December, most of which either declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests. A handful, including the Four Seasons Hotel Toronto and the boutique Gladstone Hotel, said they weren’t affected. A few more didn’t want to go on the record, but acknowledged they were advising potential clients to consider different wedding dates.
The Greater Toronto Hotel Association said that as of Sept. 29, downtown bookings for the Eras Tour weekends were 83-per-cent higher than the same weekends last year; even outside of the core, bookings were up nearly 36 per cent.
Room prices almost always surge with high demand, and many of the tens of thousands of fans who will fill Toronto’s Rogers Centre and Vancouver’s BC Place are already booking them. Hotels are betting that fans will pay big, especially for high-end suites: the Bisha Hotel’s very on-brand “The Taylor” costs $5,000 a night, and the Four Seasons’s “Superfan Suite” starts at $7,000.
As soon as Li, Bhayana and Kormos’s planner, heard about the Eras Tour dates, she immediately flagged them in her calendar. She already advises clients looking for summertime dates that massive events such as Pride Toronto can take over downtown, leading to road closures, parking-spot misery and “out-of-this-world” hotel rates. “With Taylor Swift, I think it’s on a much bigger scale,” Li says.
Lesley Shiner and Kevin Himel realized that the Eras Tour could be a problem for November wedding dates, but their mothers, who were helping with planning, suggested they shake off that fear. As soon as they started getting in touch with hotels, however, they were plied with warnings about traffic, Uber availability and restaurant bookings.
One luxury hotel, they say, warned them that they’d be disappointed by fans mobbing the lobby looking for Swift. “They were kind of begging us, ‘Please do not book here. You’ll be disappointed,’” Shiner says.
They decided to get married the first week of December, when Swift will be across the country, performing in Vancouver.
There was another logistical issue that came up for some couples who were hoping to get married in Toronto this November – one that Sarah Belbeck and Marc D’Alessandro encountered when they found a venue they loved that was only available Nov. 16 or Nov. 30.
“I have friends that are going to the concert, or who aren’t already going who want to get tickets,” Belbeck says. “I didn’t want them to have to choose between going to Taylor Swift or my wedding.” So they settled on a later date, and now she doesn’t have to choose, either. She’ll be at the Nov. 21 show.
Daisy Burns, meanwhile, will be at the Nov. 14 concert, just two days from one of the Saturdays she was initially considering as a wedding date. She and fiancé Elliot Rosenbaum live in New York, but wanted to get married in Toronto, where they’re from.
The couple had a few wedding-date criteria as they looked at late-fall and winter options. The Jewish couple wanted the sun to set early enough on a Saturday that Shabbos would pass and their officiant could perform the ceremony at a relatively early hour. But they also didn’t want to subject American friends to the deepest depths of Canadian cold. Mid-November made the most sense for them.
Burns had been thrilled to see the Eras Tour last year in Philadelphia, but didn’t realize that Swifties would be flooding hotels in Toronto during her ideal dates until she saw hotel-room prices, even in blocks, were simply “crazy.”
So the couple settled on a December wedding. Burns isn’t even all that bothered; she’s going to be walking down the aisle to a Swift song anyway. “I think that it’s a great thing that she’s coming to Toronto,” Burns says. “I was fine to change my wedding date.”