Seventy five balloons, give or take, go into our balloon garland, and over 145 go into our arch. Those two numbers sit on the same page, four paragraphs apart. Most people never compare them, because the two pieces get described in the same breath and priced close enough that the difference looks like a matter of taste. It isn’t. A balloon arch or garland in Markham is a choice between a piece that carries its own structure and a piece that borrows yours, and the balloon count is the clearest published signal of which one you’re getting. Here’s how the two compare on everything our page actually commits to, and the Markham doorway that made us change our default answer.
What Our Page Publishes for Each
Four figures, and they do all the work.
The balloon arch runs twenty four feet at $399 plus delivery and carries over 145 balloons, with over four colour options. The balloon garland runs twelve feet at $275 plus delivery and comes in approximately 75 balloons, sized from five inches to three feet, with custom options of four different colours. Those are the published facts and everything below is worked out from them.
The arch is twice the length and roughly twice the balloon count for a third more money. Put that way it looks like an obvious win, and for a lot of Markham rooms it is. The reason it isn’t always is that the arch’s page also says our team handles both delivery and setup, and a twenty four foot piece that arrives built has to have somewhere to stand.
Where the Arch Wins in a Markham Room
Anywhere the gap is real and the floor either side is free.
An arch is a span. It needs two feet of floor on each side and a clear height above, and in exchange it gives you something nobody has to look for. Guests walk through it. A Markham banquet room with double doors, a hotel corridor in Richmond Hill, the mouth of a marquee: all of those are arch shapes, and a garland in any of them would be decorating a wall next to the thing people are actually moving through.
The colour range matters here too. Over four colour options across twenty four feet means the palette has room to travel, so an arch can carry a gradient in a way a shorter piece can’t. If you’re pairing it with block marquee letters, the letters set the height the arch has to clear and that’s worth settling in the same message.
Where a Markham Balloon Garland Wins Instead
Anywhere the shape already exists.
A garland is a run, not a span. It follows something: the front edge of a table, the top of a bar, the lip of a stage, the line of a mantel. Twelve feet covers most of those, and because it’s mounted to a surface it needs no floor at all. In a Markham room where the floor is already spoken for, that’s the whole argument.
The size range is the underrated part. Five inches to three feet inside a single twelve foot run means the garland has real variation along its length, so it holds up close where a uniform piece goes flat. An arch has the same variation but you see it from further away.
The Markham Doorway That Changed Our Answer
One room, and we had it backwards.
The enquiry was for an arch over a set of double doors into a Markham function room, which is exactly the shape we’d normally say yes to. What we hadn’t asked was what happened either side of the doors, and the answer was a coat rail on the left and a fire door on the right. There was a gap but there was no floor. We ended up running a garland across the header above the doors instead, and it was the better piece for that room by some distance, at a lower figure.
Since then the first question is about the floor rather than the opening. A doorway that photographs like an arch shape and has two feet of usable floor each side is an arch. A doorway that has neither is a garland, and pretending otherwise costs somebody a delivery.
One Markham Balloon Piece, Done Properly
We’d take one, almost always.
The temptation with a Scarborough or Markham room that has an entrance and a head table is to put something at both, and the result is usually two pieces that each look slightly thin. One piece at the spot that appears in the most photographs beats two spread across a room, and it’s generally cheaper as well. Where we’d break that rule is a long room where the entrance and the photographs genuinely happen at opposite ends.
If the second spot wants covering without more balloons, one of our flower walls does a different job and doesn’t compete for the same attention. A full bloom flower wall is the same idea if you’re pricing elsewhere.
Markham Arch and Garland FAQs
The questions that settle it on a call.
Which costs less, a balloon arch or garland in Markham?
The garland, at $275 plus delivery against $399 plus delivery for the arch. That’s a genuine difference but it’s smaller than the difference in what you get, because the arch is twice the length and carries over 145 balloons against roughly 75. If the room suits an arch, the arch is the better value of the two. If it doesn’t, the arch isn’t value at any price.
Can a garland do a Markham doorway at all?
Yes, across the header above it rather than around it. That’s a real format and we fit it often, and in a doorway with no clear floor either side it’s the only one of the two that works. What it won’t do is frame the opening, so guests walk under it rather than through it and the photographs sit differently.
How many colours can we have on either piece?
The garland publishes custom options of four different colours and the arch publishes over four colour options, so both are genuinely customisable and neither is a fixed set. We ask for your colours at the reservation rather than later, because the balloons are ordered against them. Send the two your event is already using and we’ll build out from there.
Does a Richmond Hill booking change anything?
Not about the pieces, only about the route in. We ask the same questions about floor, header height and what’s either side, because those decide the format. What changes between towns is where the van stops and how far the walk is, and that’s worth mentioning when you first write. Our Markham balloon delivery work covers both formats, so the enquiry is the same one either way.
Do you set the arch up, or does it arrive in pieces?
Our page says our team handles both delivery and setup for the balloon arch, so that one arrives built and standing. We’d rather you didn’t extrapolate that to every piece on the site, because the page makes the statement about the arch specifically. Ask us about whichever piece you’re actually booking and we’ll tell you how it arrives.
What if we genuinely can’t decide?
Send a photograph of the spot, taken from where guests will stand. Nine times in ten the room answers it in a way a description doesn’t, because the thing that settles it is what’s on the floor either side and that’s exactly what people leave out when they describe a doorway to us.
Send Us the Doorway, Not the Preference
Two things, and neither is a colour.
Where it is and when it is, so we can check the diary before anything else. Then a photograph of the spot with enough of the floor in it to see what’s either side. We’ll tell you which of the two we’d send and why, and if the answer is the cheaper piece we’ll say so. Colours we settle on the call, once the format is decided, because the format is the part that can go wrong.