Advanced Topics—Airfare Considerations

One of the most important considerations in selecting your destination wedding location is the travel logistics you will encounter. If you are eloping (i.e., a guestless wedding), it really doesn’t matter. But if you are having guests, you will probably have to take this into consideration. We briefly touched on this in Choosing your Dream Location.

In our planning process, we needed some place that was easily accessible from Pennsylvania (where we live), Dallas and Denver. This became a tall order as we selected locations. You will need to decide on the critical guests on your guest list (the people you can’t live without) and what their budget constraints are.

Given the expense of airfare, most of the Eastern and Southern Caribbean became out of range. This included—Aruba, Bonaire, U.S. Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, Trinidad and Cayman Islands. We were able to find reasonable airfare to Cancun and Cozumel in Mexico, the Bahamas and Jamaica.

There are a number of websites that we checked (frequently) to try and find reasonable flights:

• Expedia
• Priceline
• Kayak.com (offers some unusual flight combinations)
• Also the airline websites themselves can offer some good flight deals
  

You will also need to decide how far in advance you start communicating details with your guests. We established a website for them and every month or so posted prices that we had researched from airports where they would be flying. As we noticed that airfares had started to bottom out, we sent out special e-mails to everyone on our guest list letting them know. It’s more work for you, but the extra effort was very much appreciated.

Finally, we did talk to a travel agent about package deals, but our guests were coming from so many different locations that this was not practical. However, this could be an option for you if your guests are coming from a similar geographic area.