Vegas Wedding Chapels Taking Big Valentine's Day Hit Due to COVID-19

Valentine's Day is usually rush hour at Las Vegas wedding chapels, but a bunch of Elvis pastors WILL be lonesome this weekend ... due to the pandemic.

According to the Graceland Wedding Chapel ... it conducted a whopping 75 ceremonies on V-Day 2020 -- just weeks before COVID-19 changed the world -- but it only has 50 on the books so far for 2021.

The famous chapel tells TMZ ... roughly half its business typically comes from international guests, but with coronavirus travel restrictions that number's a big, fat zero this year.

Graceland says it hopes to get 60 wedding ceremonies booked before Sunday, but that's still a significant decline of at least 20 percent.

A rep for Chapel of the Flowers tells us their wedding ceremony bookings are also down 20 percent this year compared to last ... but it's even worse at a couple other spots.

Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel says it's down 50 percent for V-Day, and like Graceland ... the lack of international couples is crushing its bottom line. As of now, it says it only has 17 wedding reservations for Sunday ... which is incredibly low.

The owner of Bliss Wedding Chapel, which just opened in October, tells us he's been banking on a Valentine's Day surge for some much-needed cash ... but it's not happening.

He says he's been in the biz for a while and would expect a solid 50 ceremonies under normal conditions ... but COVID's limited bookings to just 26, so far.

One thing the chapels cited for their struggles is having to operate at half-capacity. Like the Bliss owner put it -- weddings are the opposite of social distancing, so couples who would be forced to cut the guest list are simply opting to wait or go elsewhere.