AFTER four weeks of sluggish business because Shanghainese consider April to be a not-so-lucky month for marriages, Yu Jian, the general manager of the Shanghai Good Luck Wedding Service, had hoped May would signal a return to boom times.

　　May traditionally is the peak month for wedding ceremonies. "I actually did have dozens of orders. On our busiest day, we would have been rushing around doing over 10 wedding ceremonies," Yu said. All his staff were well prepared for the expected rush.

　　But the SARS scare has changed all that almost overnight. "Because of SARS, our business has been hit very hard," Yu said in a tired voice, sighing repeatedly.

　　About half the wedding orders for the first week of May - which was to have been a week-long holiday before the health crisis - have now been cancelled. Young engaged couples who had booked wedding ceremonies for the rest of May were also now reconsidering their wedding plans.

　　This is because most young couples have become worried that many of the guests invited to the wedding banquet would be frightened to attend and mingle with the crowd at the party afterwards.

　　"I am not sure what we will see in the rest of May," Yu said, and sighed again.

　　One disappointed May bride, Tian Peng, said: "It was not my wish to see my wedding ceremony cancelled, but for the sake of both my health and my relatives' safety, I decided to cancel it after worrying about it for almost a month."

　　Upset plans

　　According to Chinese tradition, parents organize the wedding ceremony which includes a banquet and a visit to the newly wed couple's home. It is also the chance for the new couple to meet many of each other's relatives and friends.

　　Tian's father-in-law-to-be had originally ordered 10 tables for a banquet in a hotel in Shandong, her fiance's hometown. Tian's mother had also invited all the family's relatives from her hometown in Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province.

　　Taking the SARS scare into account, they first cut the size of the banquet to eight tables. But finally, when Shandong Province also reported one case of SARS, Tian decided to stay in Shanghai because she thought travelling would not be safe.

　　"We also suffered some loss because we lost the deposit money," she said. "The worst is not the money but that both sets of parents are extremely upset. They feel that their dreams and hopes have been broken. We had no alternative - health should be the most important consideration."

　　Like Tian, many other new couples have had the same idea which makes this May, the anticipated boom month in the wedding industry, a nightmare for wedding planners and organizers.

　　A PR from a local five-star hotel, who asked to remain anonymous, said all the wedding banquets planned for May 1 to 3 had been cancelled.

　　"At first, they just called to query about the hygiene situation in the hotel," she said. "Later, because of all the SARS stories in the media, people became nervous. Our loss is very big."

　　Under Shanghai government regulations covering the current SARS crisis, if consumers cancel a function all the deposit money has to be refunded and the hotel or restaurant cannot demand compensation for breach of faith. "So we didn't earn a penny," the PR spokeswoman for the hotel said.

　　At the Shanghai Good Luck Wedding Service Yu is also upset at the lost business. "But who cares about my loss?" he asked. "To prepare for the wedding ceremonies, we also had tosgroupsthe car, the restaurant, flowers and cakes in advance. I also had to pay a deposit."

　　Yu now urges people not to cancel their wedding ceremony orders but merely to postpone them.

　　For the wedding ceremonies still planned for May, Yu said his staff would concentrate on hygiene. If any of the staff want to wear masks, they are allowed to.

　　The same applies at the four-star central Hotel on Jiujiang Lu where so far more than 20 per cent of the wedding banquets planned for May have been cancelled. The hotel said staff were paying close attention to ventilation and sterilization to protect the health of guests.

　　However, the disappointed bride-to-be Tian said: "I can't imagine what the wedding ceremony would look like if most people are wearing masks at the table and the restaurant is full of the smell of disinfectant.".

　　But if young couples cannot wait another day to get married, with the help of advanced technology there is one safe way to hold the wedding ceremony.

　　In Chongqing the ceremony is conducted via the Internet. The newly wed couple use a digital camera to record the wedding banquet held in their home and transfer it to their website where all their relatives can enjoy it.

　　Such "new style" wedding ceremonies have been highly praised in the local media as "civilized and advanced".