The pressure tactics have finally stopped working.

This year, the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays combined with three days of leave can give 13 days off — a "once-in-a-century" super-long break. Most workers are thinking about how to request leave and where to travel, but Su Su, a wedding salesperson in a small county town, has fallen into an unprecedented state of gloom.

In previous years, the National Day holiday was usually her busiest time. Everyone across the country has time off, and unlike the Spring Festival, there is no "obligation" to fulfill — the National Day holiday has always been peak wedding season. In her ten years in the industry, she was almost always run off her feet starting three months in advance. It wasn't until all the weddings were over and the newlyweds handed her the last red envelope that the year's biggest business was considered done.

But this year, the hotel where Su Su works only had two of the seven National Day holiday days fully booked. From October 6 onward, the schedule has been empty — something she hasn't seen in the past seven or eight years. Is it that young people are no longer holding wedding banquets, or is the marriage rate in county towns also unable to hold up?

Can the "favor economy" still sell in small county towns?

Small county town grand hotels can no longer sell

As the National Day holiday approached, the atmosphere in the entire hotel became somewhat delicate. The hotel where Su Su works was one of the most popular wedding banquet venues in this small northern city in previous years. The peak wedding season slots for the National Day holiday would previously sell out before the Spring Festival, but this year, even as the Mid-Autumn Festival drew near, there were still openings.

Su Su was anxious and started learning to use AI for marketing on the fly. Every day she posted three or four short videos generated by Doubao on WeChat Moments, dug out photos from wedding scenes taken years ago, and asked Doubao to "make the people in the pictures move, and add the subtitle 'Tying the Knot' at the end." The volume was so large that sometimes the subtitles were distorted and deformed, and she didn't even notice when she posted them — nor did anyone remind her in the comments. Perhaps no one was really watching these videos carefully at all.

"No one is holding weddings anymore." This is Su Su's most intuitive feeling. The wedding industry is a supply chain, and both upstream and downstream are feeling the chill. Emcees, photographers, makeup artists, and even real estate agents have come to Su Su to ask if she has any newlyweds to introduce. The hotel has also pulled out all the stops — 20% off drinks, free wedding planning — and even so, it still can't sell.

Many newlyweds hire wedding photographers to capture life's important moments, and this business has supported a large number of photographers and photography studios.

In the past, when selling wedding banquets, Su Su never looked for "repeat customers" — you can't exactly wish someone a second marriage, right? Now she has dug up all the newlyweds she added before, asking if any of their friends are planning to get married. She even directly contacts the "upstream" — those professional or amateur "matchmakers" in her WeChat contacts. The amateurs might just be the nosy auntie downstairs who loves to urge people to marry — asking if there are any happy occasions coming up, she's dying to add fuel to the fire.

But even if she does find newlyweds, things haven't gotten easier. The hotel where Su Su works is an old-brand grand hotel in the county town, opened in 2011. At the time, it was the largest and most luxurious hotel in the small county town. Although the decor and facilities now look somewhat dated, it is still the most prestigious choice in the eyes of the older generation. In the past, this sentiment was enough to keep customers coming through the door. Newlyweds in the small county town — either they themselves had attended a wedding banquet at the grand hotel and planted a fantasy about their future wedding, or they had no particular attachment to the hotel itself but chose it for the "face" it would give them in the eyes of both sets of parents and the small county town's social circle.

But now, the sentiment card no longer works. Newlyweds have their own ideas about weddings and always come to them with photos from social media, asking whether this kind of lighting can be done, whether this kind of ceiling design works, whether this stage can be set up. One look from Su Su and she knows — it can't be done.

The newlyweds will retort, "What's so hard about that?" Young people have different creative ideas about weddings.

Some newlyweds don't have such high expectations for their wedding, so their budget is correspondingly low. In the past, the weddings their hotel took on all required forty or fifty tables. Today's newlyweds want only twenty tables, saying they don't have that many friends back home and don't want to invite relatives they have no dealings with — they really can't fill the seats. Such small weddings were something the grand hotel wouldn't take in the past, but now there's no room to be picky.

Even the most casual person wouldn't wait until September to book an October wedding banquet, and no one would suddenly decide to get married just because a hotel is offering a promotion. By the time September arrived, Su Su could basically see the ceiling of this year's income. She could only laugh at herself: "What can I do now? Just pray that the few couples who have already booked don't argue and don't call off the wedding at the last minute — that would be a blessing."

Weddings in an acquaintance society are full of secrets

Before I met Su Su, I didn't know that an old-brand hotel in a small county town would have a dedicated wedding salesperson. Su Su is 34 this year. She didn't go to university. After graduating from a vocational college, she drifted through various sales positions — selling clothes, selling cosmetics — until she ended up helping a hotel sell wedding banquets. While wedding planners in big cities are desperately making videos and building personal brands, competing like crazy, her customer base has always been stable.

The grand hotel is a spiritual icon of the small county town. For locals like Su Su who were born and raised there, she always remembers the shock of seeing it for the first time: "The floor tiles were so shiny, and there were big chandeliers. The food was beautiful, the waiters were beautiful too." "It was so awesome — everyone would think that holding your event here is the most face-giving thing." At the time, she even fantasized that if she had gotten married two years later, maybe she could have held her wedding banquet at this hotel too — of course, she also knew her family couldn't afford that price.

Although by the time Su Su joined the company, truly luxurious weddings had long since stopped appearing in this small county town hotel, it still held considerable appeal for the people in the county town. And what Su Su really benefited from was exactly this dividend left over from the acquaintance society. In the past seven or eight years, Su Su's job was basically to sit in her office and wait for newlyweds to come to her. During peak wedding seasons like the National Day holiday, the entire hotel's schedule would be fully booked around the Spring Festival. Some orders would even come to her "through the back door" at mahjong tables or family gatherings. Compared to her peers in big cities who are killing themselves competing, she didn't even need to pursue wedding effects too much — the hotel venue is old, the conditions are just like that, and the kind of weddings with lighting, music, and spatial effects seen online really can't be done. Besides, too many decorations are hard to take down, and with the hotel's schedule packed, sometimes there are two different wedding banquets back-to-back at noon and in the evening, with the newlyweds sharing ceiling decorations, flowers, and even the big red "double happiness" character at the hotel entrance.

The decorations aren't as competitive as in the city, but the scale is by no means inferior. A wedding with thirty or forty tables is standard. After the wedding, Su Su, as a staff member, also gets a "good luck" red envelope. Over one National Day holiday, she can make more than ten thousand yuan just from red envelopes. One year, the National Day holiday happened to coincide with her being pregnant. The newlyweds all said it was a double blessing, and the red envelopes doubled directly.

According to tradition, newlyweds prepare red envelopes for their guests.

Besides earning well, in the small county town's chain of disdain, Su Su's job also holds considerable status. Having done weddings for so long, everyone in the small county town knows her, and through weddings, she can see many secrets. Su Su has received orders from her own old classmates more than once. The most extreme case was a male classmate who got married twice within three years — counting the earlier one, he was already on his third marriage by his early thirties. Before he came to Su Su the second time, she had already heard that the reason for both divorces was the mother-in-law relationship. The man's mother was very controlling. His first wife had been with him from school uniforms to wedding dresses, and in the end, they still had to divorce. When the male classmate brought his third wife to her, Su Su focused on observing the family's expressions. Both newlyweds were very silent, but silent in different ways. The woman looked around at the banquet hall, while the man kept his head down looking at his phone — "maybe he was tired of it, he's seen everything our hotel has to offer." Su Su guessed that it was the man's mother who made the decision to book their hotel. The male classmate himself probably didn't want to see her that much.

Weddings with premarital pregnancy are also not a secret in this small town. Su Su met a post-2000 girl who was anxious and insistent on holding the wedding within a few months, otherwise she was afraid it would be hard to fit into a wedding dress. A few days later, she was making a fuss about canceling the wedding, saying the man wasn't even willing to spend money on the wedding and didn't value her, so she couldn't go through with it. Actually, Su Su felt that newlyweds who specifically chose their hotel had families that valued them to some degree, and might even be a bit traditional. For example, the man in this couple came from a government family, while the woman's family background was ordinary. Su Su couldn't help but advise the girl to think more about the child. The girl said stubbornly that she could raise it herself. This stalemate lasted for over a month. Su Su contacted them to design the wedding. The man didn't reply, the woman poured out her grievances, but both sets of parents said they still wanted to hold it. On the day of the wedding, the young couple "miraculously" appeared at the banquet, holding hands and smiling happily.

Doing weddings for acquaintances, Su Su knows too many secrets. "Not gossiping about people" has become one of her "professional qualities." Young couples who argued or threatened to call off the wedding in front of her sometimes stuff a small red envelope to her after the wedding to apologize for delaying her work. Perhaps there's also a hush money implication in there. These various social niceties — Su Su has worked in this for seven years and watched them for seven years, never imagining that one day they would suddenly disappear.

Are young people not getting married?

When did grand hotel weddings start becoming unsellable? Su Su finds it hard to pinpoint a specific time. During the pandemic years, the number of tables did decrease. But in most cases, it was because out-of-town relatives and friends couldn't come back, not because the bride and groom themselves didn't want to hold the wedding. In 2022, the number of tables sold was much higher than the previous two years. At the time, everyone thought they could immediately return to pre-pandemic levels. But after that, it got worse year by year.

"Young people aren't getting married anymore." Su Su reached this conclusion, but this answer doesn't hold up to scrutiny. In 2025 and the first half of 2026, marriage registration data did not show a significant decline compared to 2024. Scrolling through WeChat Moments, Su Su can still see young people posting wedding photos and sending invitations, but the location of the banquet has shifted to grand hotels in the provincial capital. Recently she even saw a wedding banquet held at a newly opened "glamping campsite" on the outskirts of the county town. Her own niece got married last year and didn't hold a wedding at all — it was changed to a "travel wedding." The young couple went to western Sichuan to take wedding photos and posted a nine-grid layout on WeChat Moments.

In recent years, travel weddings have been favored by many young people.

The niece's mother, Su Su's cousin, was very dissatisfied and kept complaining that her daughter was being inappropriate, suspecting that the in-laws were unwilling to spend money. As a result, the niece stopped even coming home. It wasn't until the end of the year when the niece brought her husband back home for a meal that things were considered reconciled. The cousin told family members that the child is too busy with work now and has no time for a wedding, and would hold a makeup wedding in a couple of years, telling everyone to be patient.

Previously, Su Su always thought this kind of young person was an exception. Her niece had worked and lived in a big city for many years, didn't interact much with hometown people, and often did things unconventionally. But now she's gradually starting to suspect that the newlyweds who didn't come to the grand hotel might be like her niece — they went somewhere else to get married.

A 2025 survey of wedding service consumers, with a sample size of 1,357 people, found that only 41% chose hotel weddings, while other options included outdoor lawn weddings at 22%, destination weddings at 7%, and so on. Honestly, the hotel has been continuously updating its hardware in recent years to fight for banquet revenue. Aside from some stage effects that can't be achieved, it generally still looks quite nice. Young people not choosing grand hotels isn't just about the decor — it seems more about not wanting that old-style wedding with a crowd of relatives and neighbors.

The protagonists of old-style weddings were often the elders. For example, a legend always tied to grand hotel wedding banquets is that when the son of a steel factory owner in the county town married, the family booked the entire hotel and held the celebration for three days and three nights. Not only did guests get free food and lodging, even passersby got red envelopes. In that gossip, the bride and groom had no names — they were usually referred to as "the steel factory owner's son and daughter-in-law."

But compared to the past, there have been fewer weddings in the past two years, but more smiles from young people at weddings. Some newlyweds make very interesting wedding commemorative videos. Su Su saw a young couple who made a commemorative video of their journey from meeting to falling in love, using cartoon hand-drawn illustrations to fill in some key scenes. Especially in the final scene at the wedding — after the video played, the bride walked out in a wedding dress proportionally enlarged from the cartoon illustration. Su Su, as a bystander, felt very moved. Some newlyweds have particularly high requirements for the emcee and wedding speeches. Some invite their own friends to be the emcee. One guy forgot his lines as soon as he got on stage and just kept laughing. This kind of scene, which in previous years would have been considered a disaster or an accident, had the couple themselves laughing particularly happily. Su Su doesn't remember how the bride and groom's parents reacted at the time. She only knows that the guests weren't more enthusiastic or more indifferent because of it — they just ate and left amid the lively atmosphere.

More newlyweds may no longer come to traditional venues like grand hotels. In recent years, travel weddings and destination weddings have become increasingly popular online, along with outdoor lawn weddings and home parties at guesthouses. The departed newlyweds and the lost wedding banquets have dealt a significant blow to Su Su's income, and the impact on the hotel may be even greater. But Su Su's boss hasn't conveyed too much pressure to her — "maybe the projects that make money have long been something else." The hotel's future will most likely fade away bit by bit. But Su Su hasn't considered leaving yet — "if I leave, I don't know what else to do." Currently, her family's finances aren't under too much pressure, and her two children take up most of her time and energy. When the children go off to university and money is needed, maybe she'll reconsider those questions.