Destination weddings are becoming increasingly popular and for good reason. Can you imagine being whisked away to a picturesque beachside, mountain cabin, or French chateau? The options are limitless when it comes to planning a destination wedding. You can go abroad, or do it in a new location within your home country. After having the Greece destination wedding of my dreams last September, I’m a bit biased. While it adds a new layer to planning a wedding, especially if you’re planning on traveling internationally, I think that destination weddings are completely worth it. In this post, I am sharing 5 reasons why destination weddings are the best!
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5 Reasons Why Destination Weddings Are the Best
1. Destination Weddings are More Intimate
Typically, destination weddings are smaller, closer affairs. Since they are smaller and in a closer setting, it feels like a much more intimate experience. You get to spend more time with your guests. Since your guests are typically traveling to be at your wedding, you can have several days of celebration.
For my destination wedding, we booked a Greece villa for 5 days for us and our guests. With our guests, we were able to have a pre-wedding dinner, a catamaran tour, visit the Naxos monuments and town, and spend the nights visiting the villa. Rather than just having one day with our guests, we have a collection of memories from the week. It really felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I don’t think there will be another time in my life when I am swimming in the Aegean Sea on a catamaran tour with my close friends and family.
2. Destination Weddings Can Save You Money
While a destination won’t inherently save you money, I did find that it was much less expensive to have the wedding of my dreams abroad. In many places in the United States, wedding expenses have skyrocketed. It can add up to having a wedding, especially if you are in an area with a higher cost of living. You can read more on how to save money when planning a destination wedding in my post here.
A few ways we saved money when planning our destination wedding was:
- Choosing a naturally beautiful venue. By choosing a naturally beautiful setting we spend no money on decor (aside from flowers).
- Choosing a country with a lower cost of living than what would be local to us. In Greece, we got much more bang for our buck, even though the cost was much lower! We felt like we had a luxury experience for a fraction of the cost.
- Using credit card points to help pay for our flights, accommodation, and other travel expenses.
3. Destination Weddings Are Less Stressful to Plan
When planning a destination wedding, I found it to be much less stressful! Before we knew we would be having a destination wedding, we were planning for a wedding in the Portland area. Even though we were able to talk to vendors in person, things were booked out years in advance, much more expensive, and just overall a more stressful experience. Maybe it’s the destination we chose, but everything was much more relaxed! It was more go-with-the-flow, even though we didn’t have a wedding planner.
There are many different options for destination weddings. If you’re someone who doesn’t want to plan anything, many resorts offer wedding and elopement packages where all you need to do is show up. For someone who wants to be involved in planning, you can coordinate all of the vendors yourself.
4. Your Honeymoon Begins Immediately
Since we had our honeymoon in Greece, it began almost immediately following our wedding. We didn’t have to board a long flight or wait. Our honeymoon and wedding in combination felt like one long vacation! The following day after the wedding, we departed from our guests and moved on to the next island to officially begin our honeymoon. Since we were already planning on having our honeymoon in Greece, having our wedding there as well was an easy decision.
5. Destination Weddings Are a Unique Experience
Nothing compares to a destination wedding! It felt like such a unique and once-in-a-lifetime experience that we shared with close friends and family. You can curate an experience that fits your wants and needs. It can also provide you with the opportunity to do things you might not be able to do at a local wedding, like the catamaran tour that we did!
5 Reasons Why Destination Weddings Are the Best
I hope this provided some answers as to why destination weddings are the best. Whether or not a destination wedding is the right decision for you really comes down to what your vision is for your wedding. If you want a bigger celebration that all of your friends, families, and loved ones can go to, a destination wedding might not be the right choice for you. Not everyone can make it to a destination wedding, especially if it is further away or harder to get to. If you are looking for a more intimate, unique experience, a destination wedding is something to consider.
Be sure to check out my other posts on destination weddings, wedding planning, and honeymoon planning on the blog. I will be posting more on all things wedding-related in the near future!
Thanks for reading! As always, you can find me on Instagram @maddie_deer here, or can follow me on my Facebook page to be alerted of any new posts here. If you want to check out my wedding video, you can do so on Youtube here. Also, a shout-out to Alecca Synclair Photography for all of our beautiful wedding photos (which were included above in this post!).
