How to choose the perfect place for your destination wedding
It’s easy to decide to have your wedding abroad… when the ones on your instagram feed all look so amazing! Envy aside, destination weddings are remarkably common. In fact, 15% of all weddings are destination weddings.
But going abroad is a literal world of possibilities. So how exactly do you go about choosing the perfect destination for you on one of the most important days of your life?
Don’t mess with mother nature
As reported in The Daily Mail, the top 10 foreign destinations for weddings are: Mauritius, Sri Lanka, the United States of America, St Lucia, Antigua, Thailand, Barbados, Mexico, Jamaica and the United Arab Emirates.
While the hotspots continue to attract attention, you don’t need to be following the crowds. London event planners, Snapdragon have created high end destination weddings in more remote locations, ‘from Morocco to Nigeria and tiny Greek islands’.
These places are understandably popular, offering perfect weather, luxury hotels, and pristine oceans that will make your destination wedding as perfect as the most important day in your life should be. However, depending on when you go, your wedding could be spoiled by bad weather.
It’s not all sun, sea, and sand. Bad weather seasons are no joke to would-be newly weds. For example, summer in Northern Thailand is monsoon season, and your perfect day and ideal location would likely be spoilt by torrential rain. Similarly in the Caribbean, where 4 of the top 10 destination weddings are, hurricane season lasts from June to November.
Before you book your destination wedding you should thoroughly research, not just hotels and restaurants, but the country itself, and importantly that country’s climate over the year.
Find the right wedding planner
Even without the added expense of getting hitched in a foreign country, planning the perfect wedding can be very costly. In fact, MoneySavingExpert.com make the average price of a wedding to be around £20,000.
However, reliable destination wedding planners are indispensable in arranging a wedding abroad. Plenty of event planners have experience organising destination weddings, so they can give you recommendations based on your needs, and will likely be familiar with plenty of unique destinations too.
The right wedding planners will also save you the stress of trying to plan your wedding, when all you ought to be doing is relaxing. Something that can often be exacerbated by going overseas.
As well as the weather, far flung destinations can be as stressful as they can romantic, a good wedding planner should be able to save you money by making sure you aren’t exploited, bridging any language gaps and making sure any dietary requirements are tended to.
Consider your guests budgets
Destination weddings, due to the plentitude of all-inclusive deals can actually be cheaper than domestic weddings. Getting married abroad will usually narrow down your guest list from the start, so double and triple check with the most important guests that they will actually be able to come to your wedding.
You may want that perfect trip to some far flung destination, but if the people that matter most can’t afford to be there, it’ll dampen the mood much more than any monsoon would.
Although going with a planner is the best way to make sure your destination wedding goes off without a snag, packages are a useful alternative to many. Both will save you money, and a lot of stress.
According to CNTraveler, anyone looking to get married abroad should consider one of the two. They state: “Going with a planner will help you to personalise your wedding to your tastes. Packages, on the other hand, tend to be a bit more cookie-cutter, but with little risk of feeling that way, since the setting will still be new to your guests.”
By: George Norris