How to Plan a Destination Wedding without a Destination
About two months after my fiancé Jean and I got engaged and our celebratory stash of champagne ran out, we decided that it was time to sit down and start planning our wedding. We had lightly discussed the big day here and there, but we hadn’t REALLY talked about it. In fact, I wasn’t sure whether we were on the same page at all. So, on one slow Friday afternoon at work, I opened up an email draft and began furiously writing down all my ideas – no matter how unreasonable or exotic. As an attempt at organization, I put everything into a neat little section, labeled as such:
A. Invitations (divided into Essentials, Undecided, Least Likely, and Family)
B. Location
C. Timeline
I think this was probably the best part of planning for me (thus far) – letting myself be creative and really dig into what kind of wedding I wanted, and where. To preface, I’ve never been the kind of girl who has envisioned her wedding. My parents eloped, and I never let myself dream of having some sort of extravagant, expensive, big, and beautiful wedding. I was starting from scratch, with few people to turn to for wisdom.
A. Invitations
Everyone will tell you to sort out your guest list first and foremost, and I agree. You don’t have to decide then and there exactly who you’re inviting, but you need a ballpark number. All wedding venues are different, and some can only fit, say, 90 people. If you’re inviting 150, you can say goodbye to that venue.
On my end, the invitations piece of the puzzle was fairly easy. I don’t have a big family, and I have a few close friends scattered around the world. Having moved around a lot, you just can’t keep in touch with everyone. So, as I mentioned earlier, I broke up the invitations into four sections: essentials, undecided, least likely, and family. The people who made it into the essentials section were the obvious ones, those that I couldn’t really imagine my wedding day without. Those that fell into the “undecided” pool were people that I thought would be nice to invite but didn’t necessarily NEED at my wedding.
Frankly speaking, I was being extremely strict with my guest list. At this point in time, I was dead set on having a fairly small wedding – around 60-70 guests. As soon as it became clear to me that this wouldn't happen, and the guest list would be closer to 100+, I ended up being able to invite a few more people. The least likely list has stayed the same for the most part – it’s a bit of a “to be decided” category. And lastly, I made my mom deal with the family part of the list. See, easy peasy.
But wait, I’m not finished. It’s not actually that simple. My fiancé, who has a big family and a lot of friends, has had a much harder time with his list. He’s still dealing with it, and probably will be until our official invitations go out. With so many family members to invite, it’s impossible to keep the numbers contained while also pleasing your parents (and you).
Throughout all of this, I have tried keeping one notion top of mind: this is your day, please do what makes you happy. Personally, I don’t want an overwhelming 300 person wedding, spending the night being tossed around like a tennis ball from Aunt Suzie to Stranger Helen to Neighbor Edward. I’d like to have some time to catch my breath and be around the people I invited. So, my only advice at this point along my journey is to stand your ground and try to comprise. If at the end of the day you have no choice but to invite long-lost great godmother Beatrice and her three sons, so be it. At least you tried.
B. Location
This one was TOUGH. Most normal people have an idea of where they want to get married, except us. I truly had no idea where to go. Would it be North Carolina, where I was raised, or Poland, where my family is from? Would it be France, where Jean is from, and if so, where in France? Along the southwest coast where he spent his summers growing up, or at his grandfathers, where his cousin already got married and is sort of in the middle of nowhere?
Or would we do it in New York, where we met in the first place, or Florida, where my parents now live? California made its way onto my list, because who doesn’t love California? Hawaii was there too for a hot second, as was every Caribbean island I’ve heard of.
Eventually, we somehow narrowed things down to the entire European continent, throwing out a number of destination wedding options. I promise you, this is a direct copy-paste of my “brainstorming” list:
Greece: Amazing and exotic; probably cheaper than France; for those coming from the US I think there are direct flights to Athens and then a ferry would need to be taken to the respective island but this sounds fairly simple
Pyla, France: Jean loves it, but how would the weather be? What venues are there? Might be too tricky to get to from the US (no direct flights to Bordeaux and then once in Bordeaux you would need to drive/take a train... so a connecting flight and a transfer)
City where Jean’s grandfather is from (that I can never spell): Repeating Arthur's wedding sounds like a shame; also very hard to get to and not along the water; would require a tent
Bordeaux, France: Chateau vibes. Pretty but is this our style? Would require a connecting flight
A boat off the Mediterranean
Italy: A good idea but not sure it's 100 percent what we want (although the food....!); where in Italy?
Portugal: Where in Portugal? Same vibe as Greece. Lagos and the south seems fairly far from Lisbon and would require a connecting flight
Corsica, France: I would like to visit, but not sure this is the place to do it; it looks like there are no direct flights so you would have to connect and I also fear prices are going to be high
Confusing, right? Well, it was. We spent the next two months contacting so many planners, setting up calls with them at 7 am before we had to head out to work. We boiled options down to Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia. In Spain, we were specifically looking at the island of Mallorca and had a really great planner working with us. Why did this option not win in the end? Jamon de bellota aside, it didn’t feel like us, and we were worried it would be too hot.
Italy was number one on my list. I had dreams of pasta stations during the cocktail hour, pizza at midnight, and a great band playing all the cheesy Italian songs that I love. Why didn’t this work out? The prices. It seemed as though all the venues we found not too far from a large airport were insanely expensive and had time restrictions (but they were SO FREAKING BEAUTIFUL). The more cost-friendly villas or castles on the outskirts of towns seemed like great options but were simply too far away to ask our guests to travel to.
Portugal was a fantastic option for both of us, and we were nearly set on having our wedding here. The weather is great, the people are friendly, the food is fantastic, and a wedding would certainly cost less than in France or Italy. We found a planner that we really liked but unfortunately didn’t find THE venue for us. All of our favorites were either too far from Lisbon or fully booked for the entire year. We kept trying, but I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.
At some point, Jean threw Croatia into the mix of our potential options. I wasn’t open to the idea, but when I saw the wedding one couple had over there I decided to find out more. I even hopped on a call with a very nice girl who told me all about what they did, what she thought, etc. She really sold me on the idea of repeating her wedding, which was truly something unique and special, and not at all what you see every day. They genuinely hired actors to perform at the theater they rented out, along with a live band from the UK. Not your average wedding. The planner we were working with was great as well. She was reassuring, honest, and kind. In the end, when we were close to finally saying yes to a venue, and yes to Croatia, we found out that the venue (the one that made us consider getting married in Croatia in the first place) had changed management, and guess what? The prices had increased three-fold. And so the idea died, just like that.
Upset about how things were turning out, I decided to do some more research. The venues in Portugal didn’t seem right. Spain wasn’t clicking. Surely there was something out there for us? And so I googled Budapest weddings. I had suggested Budapest to Jean a while back when I spoke to the Croatia girl and she mentioned her sister got married there and had a lovely wedding, but he had dismissed it. Yet desperate times call for desperate measures, and I wanted to investigate. My mom is a huge fan of Budapest, I’ve only heard good things, and I had been dying to go there for years. It felt different, and original - someplace neutral, a place in between my Eastern European heritage and Jean’s French-ness. When I saw the venues there online, Jean says he saw “stars in my eyes.” It clicked. Everything was beautiful. I could see us getting married there, at one venue in particular.
And that is exactly how we landed on Budapest, Hungary as our destination. When people asked us, “why Budapest?” or “are you Hungarian?” we didn’t have a direct answer. The location simply worked for us. We’re a couple with mixed nationalities, mixed cultures, and we wanted our wedding to represent that. So we said yes to Budapest, and booked tickets to visit over Thanksgiving break. It’s crazy to think that we would have our wedding in a city that I had never even visited before, but I wasn’t worried. We sent out our save the dates before we even checked out the venues in person. We had a good feeling, and all I can say is that sometimes you just have to go with your gut on these things.
C. Timeline
I wouldn’t waste too much time on this, but if you’re curious to see mine, this is what it looked like:
Ring: When I started jotting down my dream wedding ideas, I didn’t even have a ring. I suggest starting there. Once you get that on your finger, the fact that you’re getting married really hits, and the questions start rolling in. Where are you getting married? When? How many people? No pressure, but the sooner you have those answers, the better you’ll feel.
Engagement party: Don’t do this if it’s going to stress you out. You’re going to have enough to deal with over the next year. But if you’re anything like me, and you’re always looking for an excuse to drink champagne, this is a great one. Jean and I organized a little party with his family and friends while we were on vacation in France. We took a boat out, had cheese, ham, and lots of champagne on the water for a few marvelous hours. It was one of the best times I’ve had there. And not that this really matters, but we got our official “let’s announce on social media that we’re engaged photo” during that trip. I hate myself for even saying that. You may think you don’t want one of those photos (I didn’t), but deep down you kind of sort of do. The point is, the “engagement party” really captured how happy we were.
Pick a date and venue: See section above. We dealt with our venue search after our engagement party, and after vacation. It was really great to enjoy the first few months of simply being engaged, but if you’re picky about your venue, you may want to start hunting for something earlier than we did. I regretted our delay a little bit. Everyone will tell you how hard it is to find a venue, and how you need to start looking early, but until you see for yourself just how competitive it is, it’s hard to believe. People are crazy about weddings, and I mean seriously crazy. Once you find the venue and pick a date, half the battle is won.
Budget: You should figure out how much you can afford to spend, in total. Weddings cost a lot of money.
Pick bridal party: This can be done once you have an established venue and date.
Invitations/save the date: We sent out our save the date as quickly as we could, to buy ourselves time to send out the actual invites. Our wedding is in October 2020, and our save the dates were mailed out in November. We actually got in a little tiff about the save the dates. Jean wanted to create a Facebook event to announce our upcoming wedding, a digital, modern, and millennial “save the date.” When I said there was absolutely no way on earth we were making our wedding a Facebook event, he then suggested sending out an email. Call me old-fashioned, but I wanted to send out actual save the dates, you know, on paper. In the end, we gathered all the addresses we needed through Zola - they have a great tool that lets you send your guests a link, where they can each fill in their information (this spares you from creating a massive, confusing excel document and manually inputting addresses). We then used Zola as well to create our save the date postcard. The whole process was seamless, super easy, and only cost about $50 (more to mail out save the dates to Europe). I even ordered us fun U.S. stamps, with a romantic carriage and “save the date” written above. Yeah, I’m a dork.
Find a dress: Thus far the worst part of the process. Continue here.
Plan out everything else: I’ll keep you posted.