Anyone remotely associated with the wedding industry has no doubt heard about the Boston Bridal Show Scam. This story was picked up by media literally all over the world. I guess that wedding-related bad news makes for a good story. Bridal shows come and go all the time, and many new shows are announced that never happen. Most aren't scams, just business failures. The Boston show was probably a scam from the beginning, since the promoters never even booked a date at the convention center, but I think that the media has blown this way out of proportion. Here's my take:
The situation in Boston is truly unfortunate, and I feel sorry for the brides and vendors who were taken in by this scam. That said, I think that the numbers thrown about by the media are grossly inflated. Through my years of experience in producing shows, I know that only 20 to 40 percent of attendees purchase their tickets in advance, and more than half of those sales come the week of the show, and the majority of those two days prior. Applying these percentages to this situation, if they had sold 6000 tickets a week out, their total attendance would have ended up as as high as 25,000. There are only a few bridal shows in the entire country that get even 5000 attendees (remember, we're targeting only the one percent of the population that is planning a wedding), and these are long-established shows with lots of television, radio and print advertising. I highly doubt that a new show that was promoted only online would have had anything close to these attendance numbers. Likewise, wedding vendors tend to have a healthy degree of skepticism, and even in shows where we have a 15 year track record, there are very few who would pay by phone or Paypal without some sort of documentation. When the smoke clears, I believe that you will find that, at best, they sold a couple hundred tickets and a couple dozen booths. Still unfortunate, but not nearly as bad as the press has described.
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