Destination Weddings - How to plan a destination wedding

Destination Weddings – How to plan a destination wedding

Destination weddings – How to pan a destination wedding. Here at Louise Perry Weddings, we plan luxury destination weddings right across the world. Recent years have seen us travel to Italy, France, Ibiza and St Moritz and this year we are heading further a field to Mauritius.

How do you go about planning a destination wedding? The planning process is exactly the same, you choose the time of year to get married, the location and the venue and then progress from there. The only difficulty is, you are looking for your suppliers without any knowledge of them or their work. This is why you really do need a wedding planner to help you. As with any wedding, there are hours and hours involved in planning, but you also do have a language barrier to deal with and on the continent, they don’t do things as quick as we do here.

You need to start by deciding where and if you are not getting a planner to help you, then you need to start doing your online research. When you have short listed your venues you must go and see them. Book a weekend away and go and view venues. I have found whilst planning destination weddings, some of the websites are absolutely shocking and yet the venues are stunning and vice versa. Don’t book without viewing.

When it comes to finding suppliers, consider taking some from the UK. Don’t think you have to get a photographer in Italy or France, you could go with someone in the UK. You may find that even if you pay their flights and accomodation it won’t cost anymore than hiring someone in the country. We do this all the time. Our clients like it, as it means they can meet the photographer, videogrpaher before they book, just like if you were planning a UK wedding.

You can also do this with hair and make up, again something we do a lot when planning a destination wedding. This way you can have a trial in the UK in your own time.

You can also consider hiring a local planner, rather than someone in the UK, although I find my clients like to have a planner here that they can meet with. A little word of warning if you are going to hire someone local, they work differently from a financial point of view. They often work completely on a commission basis. Their fee might be really low, but they are getting money back from all of their suppliers. Now I don’t have a problem with this, a supplier giving the planner a referral fee. I do have a problem when the planner gets the supplier to mark up their fees and then takes a commission. This is rife in the industry, especially overseas, so you end up paying more for all of your suppliers. Be super careful when hiring a wedding planner overseas. You would be better hiring a good UK based destination wedding planner and knowing what you are paying for.

Do get in touch if you need any help planning your destination wedding. Here are a few images of some of our destination weddings.