My name is Quentin and I will be a guest writer for this Destination Weddings blog category. A little about me: my background is in travel, and I currently work for DestinationWeddings.com, which is a full-service Destination Wedding planner. I have seen over 3,500 Destination Weddings start and finish with our service, so you can say that I’m pretty in touch with planning in general!
I was having a hard time trying to decide what to write about for my first post. There are a TON of topics that I could open up for discussion, but I decided that a perfect place to start would be to tell you about my own Destination Wedding. Last year I was married on the beach in Nassau, Bahamas. Below is a photo of the ceremony site on the beach, and as we go along I’ll include more (and perhaps a video or two). So onto the topic…
I know that this seems like a “no-brainer”, but believe me many couples have a hard time with this step. The fact is if you are planning a Destination Wedding you are going to have fewer guests. The exception to that would be if you were one of the very rare couples that choose to pay for your guests to travel (very generous, but not gentle to the budget). Guests can have a lot of personal reasons (financial, family, work, etc) that leave them unable to attend your Destination Wedding. In my case we had about 50 guests in the Bahamas, versus what probably would have been a 200+ circus in Boston.
Since I work for a Destination Wedding company you would think that there was no question in my mind that we’d have a DW right? Not necessarily, we did do some real thinking about it, and it just happened to work out… here’s why:
- DWs are cheaper. 90% of couples spend under $10,000. We probably would have spent over $30,000 to get married in Boston. Instead we saved that money for a down payment for a house.
- We wanted something unique. I have been to so many weddings over the past couple of years that they all blend together. I get dressed up, eat the meal, make some small talk, dance a little (not a pretty sight), and that’s it. We wanted something that everybody, including us, would remember.
- We have enough stuff. I had been living with my fiancé for 5 years, and we have two of everything. We didn’t need a huge wedding registry to get a ton of household goods. In fact, one of my friends bought me another blender for a joke. I have to admit that I did laugh…just not in front of him.
- Who do you disappoint? Our families are not from the same area, so if we got married somewhere in the US then one side of the family has to travel. Both sides have the perfect spot in mind near them that means something to that side of the family, so how do you decide? We didn’t…everybody is coming to the Bahamas!
- Gotta love the beach! We both love the Caribbean and couldn’t think of anything more appropriate then to get married in paradise and spend the weekend relaxing with our closest family and friends.
So that is how it went for me. Next I will probably tell you about how we had to change our perfect location to suit our guests (even though I swore I never would do that).
-Quentin
For information on planning your wedding visit our site and download our free report on planning a successful Destination Wedding .
