Nearly all of the major cruise ship lines offer weddings these days. We briefly looked into this for our destination wedding, but had trouble with the logistics (too many family members coming from too many different places) to make it work.
But Ultimate Destination Weddings will be taking a much-deserved multi-week holiday cruise in December! We’re going to be scoping out cruise ship weddings, ports of call and reporting back in early January! Watch for more details.
It’s another bachelorette party – dressing up, wearing the mock veil, getting drunk, going bar hopping and feeling bad the next day. But that’s not what you want for your bachelorette party. You want different. You want fun. Sure you want to drink, but don’t want to get out of control. You want the kind of bachelorette party where you can take your mom and your 16-year-old niece. And did we say you want to have fun?
Try this on for size: Cooking School. It’s not some stodgy cooking school, we’re talking fun, wine and fantastic food you’ve cooked yourself. You bring the girlfriends, they provide the chef to teach you and the food to prepare. It’s a blast (and you even get to keep the apron).
We’ve done it several times and absolutely love it. We’ve taken the Basic Knife Skills class and the Date Night – Lobster Bisque and Steak. We’re already booked into the Indian Dinner for the spring.
When it comes to destination weddings, many local tourism or convention & visitor’s bureaus offer good websites that can help you with the planning process (some even special destination weddings sections).
In the Caribbean, nearly every country has a site. Here is a comprehensive list of Caribbean tourism and convention and visitor’s bureau websites:
Wedding wine and cocktail selections are not something you usually have control over. However, cocktail and spirit selections are a reflection of your personality. This is a point that you should try to negotiate with your venue.
For wedding wines, try to find something unusual and memorable (both for you and your guests). Many venues will give you one white and one red. Your will be a chardonnay (maybe a pinot grigio if you're really lucky). Your red will be a merlot or possibly a Cabernet Sauvignon. These wines are the same ones that are served at nearly every event known to man - from boring work receptions to the woman down the street's wedding. Not very fun, creative or inviting. Why not spice things up a bit? Or at least dare to be different!
We’re white wine drinkers, but are on an ABC kick (“anything but chardonnay”). Consider a Riesling (Chateau Ste Michelle from the U.S. or just about any riesling wine from the Mosel-Saar region in Germany) or a Gewurztraminer.
Instead of champagne, find a different sparkling white wine. We’re big fans of Prosecco and Franciacorta from Italy. (see Wedding Toast, Part I).
On the red wine front, why not a nice Côtes du Rhône or Chianti?
Finally, if you’re having a tropical destination wedding, consider doing cocktails instead of wines (your venue will definitely accommodate this, and frankly will love you for it…they make more money). We did this for our wedding and opted for Pina Coladas and Bahama Mamas.
A recent comment on our blog by Amanda W. asked about Sandals Weddingmoon and the “Test Drive your honeymoon.” She’s reluctant to sign up and asks if we know anything about the “Test Drive” because it seems like a timeshare sales pitch.
The answer to the question is an honest one – we don’t know. We vaguely remember hearing something about the “test drive” some time ago, but we didn’t do it (although we did consider Sandals). The trips are one day (out in the morning, back in the evening) and are only offered from a limited number of east coast cities. Sandals adds the normal conditions (space is limited space, subject to availability, etc., etc.). Cost for the day trip is $99 and includes airfare.
So Amanda, for $99 and one day off of work, you can have a one-day trip to Jamaica, see the resort and know exactly what you’re getting into. (We did this with the Westin Our Lucaya in the Bahamas, but had to pay the full amount and made a long three-day weekend of it). If you do the test drive and then book a honeymoon, Sandals will apply your $99 to the honeymoon package. Presumably they would do the same thing for a Weddingmoon, but the website doesn’t actually say it (best to call and ask some specific questions. Actually, you should definitely call since there aren't many specifics on the website).
It’s a brilliant piece of marketing for Sandals – give your target audience a sample your resort. The cost of $99 essentially covers the airfare, so the company isn’t out anything except for lunch and a few fruity drinks. Now, if the Sandals resorts really wanted to sell their packages, they would charge couples $200 and let them stay overnight for free. Now that’s a test drive!
Fair disclosure: Despite all of our travels, we’ve never actually been to a Sandals resort (although we’ve been thinking about one of their places in St. Lucia-see picture)…so, we can’t actually recommend them (we can’t dissuade you either). So Amanda W., you’re on your own with Sandals. If you decide to do it, I hope you’ll e-mail us and tell us about your experience.
One of the most difficult things about planning a destination wedding in another country is getting quality information (including reliable information about license requirements, etc.).
The Barbados tourism office has launched I Do Barbados, a website resource to learn everything about this island nation and having your destination wedding there. And we mean everything. This website is a one-stop-shop for everything you need.
Barbados is one of the few Carribean destinations that we haven't been to yet. So we may need to move this up on our list.
We were married on Grand Bahama Island, but decided to go to a different island for the honeymoon. Based on a recommendation from a coworker, we chose to go to The Atlantis resort on New Providence and Paradise Island.
I guess we bought into the hype – the website, the marketing materials, etc. It seemed so adult and romantic. After a week with our families, we thought it was exactly what we wanted.
What we found was a HUGE resort that was wall-to-wall children. Atlantis is Disneyland on the beach. We estimated the average age at the place was somewhere south of 14. Not what we were looking for. We ended up spending a fair amount of time down the beach at the One And Only Ocean Club (where Lionel Ritchie was staying and we bumped into him several times).
We tried to get off the Atlantis property as much as possible. We went into Nassau for a day. And another day, we went to the other side of the island for scuba diving with Stuart Cove’s. This is a big dive outfit, but they do a good job with personal service. The Hollywood Bowl dive site is fantastic and we got to have a close encounter with some live lobsters.
We also spent a fair amount of time in the casino, where Laura played the roulette wheel with our wedding date and it hit. So we made a fair amount of money in the casino. But the other facilities, namely the restaurants, were very over priced and were of disappointing quality. Lance had to send his lobster back to the kitchen at the Bahamian Club because it was overcooked and rubbery (and then we got attitude from the staff for complaining about the inferior quality). We loved the food at Fathoms, but were disappointed in the large numbers of screaming children. The restaurants in the Marina Village were better, both in terms of quality and price. Our favorite was Carmine’s – one of our favorite restaurants back in New York, so we enjoyed it here.
In addition to honeymoons, The Atlantis also does destination weddings. We saw several weddings going on while we were there. The weddings were held out in the common areas, so you’re still dealing with lots of gawkers and people walking very close by, so think carefully about this one. At one wedding, a group of young girls in bathing suits decided to join right in on the wedding. There’s nothing inherently wrong with lots of children, it’s just helpful to know that’s what you’re getting before you show up there. If you want a “family friendly” wedding, this might be your place.
We’re glad we did it once (been there, done that). Had we done more research, we probably would have gone someplace else with a more romantic and sophisticated atmosphere.
Wedding guru Preston Bailey, who partners on destination weddings with the Sandals Resorts, has an interview up on YouTube (more on destination weddings at Sandals next week). See the Preston Bailey interview:
Preston Bailey’s tips for destination weddings include:
Use the natural scenery
Use local vendors
Flexible activity schedule
We would agree with each of these.
One of the advantages of destination weddings are that the scenery (oftentimes a beach or a castle) forms the backdrop for your wedding. This means you can get away with less decorations, but can also use decorations that are native to the location where you are having your wedding.
Bailey recommends using local vendors. We would agree, but with a caveat. Using local vendors takes the hassle out of shipping lots of stuff. However, the caveat is that you might not always be able to find something you want in your location. For our Caribbean wedding, we took some tulle and ribbons from a local Michael’s craft store, but otherwise used the ocean as our backdrop.
Finally, have a flexible activity schedule. This is key. We found that having both flexible options and lots of options was important for guests. We had a couple of defined events (a welcome reception the night before, the wedding, a post-wedding cocktail party and then reception were all carved in stone). Then we had other events (renting wave runners, bar hopping in town, etc.) that were optional/elective events for those who wanted to participate.
These are great tips from Preston Bailey.
Note: We found this on YouTube and it was posted from something called Brideorama (a bridal video community). We’ve never used Brideorama, so can’t recommend it.
Weddings in general, but especially destination weddings, can have a significant environmental impact. Sad, but true. It is important to try and minimize your environmental impact, both for your own personal satisfaction and for future generations.
One way to do this is through carbon offsets or carbon credits. According to Wikipedia: “Carbon credits are a key component of national and international emissions trading schemes… There are also many companies that sell carbon credits to commercial and individual customers who are interested in lowering their carbon footprint on a voluntary basis.” Carbon credits have received some criticism lately (and there have been some scams), so it’s important to do business with a reputable firm.
Essentially it works like this – you pay a little money to a company or nonprofit group to offset some aspect of your life (your car, your household energy use, etc.). The company or nonprofit uses the money to fund projects that generate environmentally-friendly power (i.e., wind power, methane, etc.) – these are projects that aren’t likely to be built, except with the support of people like you and us. The carbon credits are relatively inexpensive and range from $2-15 per month, or $25+ per year.
We are fans of two groups offering this service. The first is a non-profit organization called CarbonFund.org. They also offer a special ZeroCarbon Wedding – an 8-ton carbon offset, for $44. This is tax deductible. The second company is Native Energy. They are for-profit company, but specialize in building new projects (and actually offer specifics on the projects they fund).
We fully appreciate that weddings are expensive and this is probably one time in your life that you don’t have extra money laying around to buy carbon credits. Doing this is important. Please consider it.
The Spring 2008 collections are out. After the fall collections (god, they were ugly), spring is a refreshing change.
A good friend of ours has been looking a for a nice navy blue bridesmaid dress at a reasonable price. Well, she’s in luck! Ann Taylor Celebrations collection has added some new colors, including navy blue. The “Cornflower Blue” color is still a favorite of ours…and very popular with people having destination weddings.
Since a destination wedding, by default, includes some sort of travel, couples are inclined to tack the honeymoon onto the wedding. Sandals Resorts calls them a Weddingmoon. And there is some appeal in doing this since it minimizes time away from work and maximizes your travel budget.
However, if you have guests coming, you don’t really want them around on your honeymoon. You can either tolerate some guests hanging on (as they inevitably will be one or two who will) or you can think of some other options.
There are two strategies to cope with this:
Continue with the trip, but go to another location. This is what we did with our destination wedding in the Bahamas. We got married on one island, but then went to another island for the honeymoon. A friend of ours got married in France with a large entourage of family, but then went to Spain for their honeymoon.
Come home and take a separate honeymoon a few months later. This way, you get two trips for one occasion! This is definitely more expensive, but is nice to space out the festivities.
