Our wedding childcare provider canceled after parents booked around it

Our wedding childcare provider canceled twelve days before the wedding.

Eight families planned around the service.

The ceremony is child-inclusive. The evening reception is adults-only, and we arranged two caregivers in a hotel meeting room with dinner, games and sleeping mats. Parents registered in advance and booked rooms at the same hotel.

The provider lost staff to illness and cannot meet its required caregiver ratio. They refunded us and sent a list of other companies. Every company we contacted is already booked.

My fiancé thinks we should allow the registered children at the reception. The venue can add chairs, and the caterer can prepare children's meals. He says changing one policy is better than forcing parents to find unknown sitters in a city they do not live in.

I agree with the fairness and worry about the reality. The reception has no quiet room, the music is loud and the timeline runs past eleven. We designed the evening around adults because that was the experience we wanted, not because we believed children would damage it merely by existing.

My sister suggested hiring individual sitters recommended by each family and reimbursing the cost up to our original childcare budget. That gives parents control but sends different caregivers into hotel rooms with very little time for screening.

The hotel may be able to offer a smaller licensed provider from its vendor list, but the company can cover only five children. Choosing which families receive the remaining spaces would be worse than canceling the service evenly.

We could allow all eight families to decide: bring children to the reception, arrange their own care with a reimbursement or decline without guilt. That creates uncertainty in the final count but respects the problem we caused by changing the plan.

Some parents may still feel trapped. Travel is paid. Formal clothes are packed. A flexible option does not recreate the service they were promised.

We need to contact them before solving every detail. Waiting for a perfect replacement uses the time they need to make choices.

Would you open the reception to the registered children, reimburse family-selected care or combine both options? When a hosted childcare plan fails, how much responsibility does the couple have to preserve an adults-only reception rather than changing the event around the families who relied on it?