This is the kick off of my new destination wedding series! As most of you know, Dustin and I got married in Disney Springs July 1st of 2017… IT. WAS. HOT. But perfect! We decided about 2 months after we got engaged that we wanted a destination wedding. The thought of walking down the isle in a traditional setting just wasn’t for us! Once we decided to have a destination wedding my stress level went from 10 to 2, REAL fast.

Discussing with immediate family

We wanted to make sure that our family was okay with this decision before we even began planning! This was asking people like my parents and his parents their opinion and to make sure that they were on board with the destination wedding. All of our family was very supportive and made the decision that much easier for us!

Deciding when we would get married

Deciding what time of the year has a lot of contributing factors. Things like, price of destination, is the venue booked, family members, and so much more! Prioritize and take all of these things into consideration when picking the time of year! We also agreed that having a destination wedding limited when we could have our wedding. About half of our immediate family work in schools! So we decided that we needed to choose between summer and winter break based on that! We chose summer and we actually got married on my parents 17th wedding anniversary which was so so special!

Budget

This is a big contributor to choosing a destination wedding! Asking yourself and other people contributing financially can also help you decide if a destination wedding if right for you. Deciding on a budget with both of our families made deciding a lot easier. We knew exactly what we could spend on things. For us, when it came to budget, having a destination wedding was probably less than having a wedding close to home. Overall, we had less people there, and we didn’t necessarily have to pay for a venue, read more about that here. I think part of my stress when we thought about having a traditional wedding was the cost. We were looking at venues and a lot of them were $4,000-$8,000 just to rent the space!!! LIKE WHAT?!

Deciding where to have our wedding

This should be a special place for the both of you! OR somewhere that is on your bucket list, this is the perfect time to check a place off your bucket list for sure! For us, this was a pretty easy decision! We wanted to go somewhere that was special and after we decided on summer we narrowed it down to Florida! We both love Disney, but didn’t want to pay for a Disney wedding. Disney springs was the PERFECT alternative! I will share more about cost and details in a later post! You can read that here.

Consider visiting your destination prior to the wedding

If its possible, consider visiting your destination before the wedding. This will allow you to meet with vendors, scope out the place, do some planning in person and ultimately eliminate stress of not knowing what things look like. Exactly one year(by coincidence) I visited our destination with my mom, grandma and two of my sisters. We were able to see the location, both the rehearsal dinner location and the reception location while we were there. It was nice to be able to talk to the event coordinators at each of the spots in person. It made me feel better knowing the person that I was emailing back and forth with.

Coordinating guests

One huge question that you should ask yourself is if you are prepared to coordinate all of the people you are inviting from basically now until the wedding trip is over. For us this was coordinating 29 people with all different personality types, some people were really on top of things and then others we would have to constantly ask where they were at with certain things. I will be writing a whole blog post on this because I think there is so much that goes into it and I can share my tips for it!