How I Improved My DESTINATION WEDDING – at least for us!
Well hello! Continue on assuming you met the guy or gal of your dreams and you have a date that is nonnegotiable. But, if you need a quick and easy 3 step process to picking a date, go ahead and check out my "Pick Your Wedding Date Using 3 Brilliant Steps!" blog. And now… onto the story!
So, of course we tell our friends, ‘We have a date! June 19,2021!’ with all the excited splendor! “Great, where are you getting married?” Wait, what?... a little crazy and a whole lot of bizarre (queue the OMC song …How Bizarre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2oC99e_xPY )
I mean, didn’t we just tell you our date? You also want the location?
The more people we told, the more people asked “where”? I get it, I wanted to know too and “someplace tropical” was no longer satiating them. They wanted all the details!
So, we started talking about it. Small conversations here and there lead to progress. We decided our home state was out of the running. Average June temps are 104F in the great state of Arizona…wait, maybe I forgot one little detail...when my wedding pops into my head, I see an outdoor ceremony – tropical…water...OCEAN! Ok, now does the no-Arizona thing make sense?
Then, one day, as my Ortho doc, Kelly, you’ll meet her in a future blog, was talking about her wedding and how she had it in Maui, HI with no reception and it was only $4500! They had a great wedding, breath-taking views, and gorgeous photos right by the water! I was sold. I went home and started researching.
Turns out, she wasn’t wrong. A nice ceremony and a great dinner (she had luau style) could be done for quite a bit less than what I thought! I proposed the idea to Chris, showed him what I found and it was on!
Chris’s little sister Bernie was married Oct.4, 2019. It was the day after her wedding that we told our family that we were getting married in Maui, Hawaii! That was a full 21 months heads up to be able to save.
If we wanted a destination wedding (especially that destination), it was important to us to give the key players as much heads up as possible!
The next daunting task was finding a venue. We knew that we wanted all the shenanigans in one spot, no travel during the day. We also wanted it at the place where guests could stay. Also, no travel after the wedding. Ok, this was more me than him. These things were important to me. So, I started looking at hotel venues in Maui.
I will never forget the one estimate that came back, early in my search. I checked out on of the 5 star hotels in Maui, mostly because the views were unmatched from what I saw. I explained what we were envisioning and they got the quote back to me…. $99,000.00!!! Now, granted, it was for 100 people, full reception, looking opulent as ever, but to say it was far outside our budget is a serious understatement!
Now, the holidays come and go, and, by this time, we were headed into the Spring of 2020 and Covid-19 is alive and well globally. I was still casually looking into venues in Maui as we were quickly approaching the one year mark to the wedding. We were also keeping a VERY close eye on Hawaii’s reaction to the virus situation. I became increasingly uncomfortable with the quarantine possibilities of traveling to Hawaii.
Granted, June 2020 is exactly one year out from our actual wedding, but, the thought occurred to me that the future of air travel is questionable. I began thinking of all possibilities tied to Maui: cost, opportunity, vaccinations, quarantine. These all became topics at every gathering with our friends and over dinner with Chris.
The decision came in early July. Chris and I were in the pool talking about the wedding. We wrote down all the pros and cons out and we made the decision to move the wedding closer to home. We were back at square one…but not quite. We had some ideas.
One thing remained the same, Arizona was out. Las Vegas was considered for a minute, but dismissed when the possible venue was booked. Florida was too humid. California was too expensive…. or was it?
Early on in our venue talk, Chris talked about having the wedding on a yacht. So, I started looking up yacht charters in the one place I loved in California – San Diego.
We found one that we loved and got in touch with them. They sent us pictures and wrote up an estimate and it blew my mind! I honestly thought that having our wedding in San Diego would cost just as much as having our wedding at the 5-star resort in Maui!
Nope!
We did need to see the boats though, so we gladly booked a trip to San Diego in August 2020!
It was during the negotiations we discovered another obstacle (opportunity is probably a better word) that we didn’t have when planning a destination wedding – a wedding planner. You see, when planning a wedding at a hotel, the hotel is usually equipped with an onsite event coordinator, so we didn’t need to hire one. But, a yacht wedding, especially a destination yacht wedding, needs a wedding coordinator/planner.
The prospect of securing a wedding planner legit scared my checking account! When I started looking at venues in AZ, wedding planners were ranging between $5-$9k! I wouldn’t even know where to look in San Diego, so I asked the only person I knew for a recommendation – the yacht company. What could it hurt?
They gave me only one name…ok… I looked her up on google, then social media, cause that’s what you do when you are trying to find out info. Right? I liked her work, I loved what she created so I reached out to her. After our first meeting, she was perfect and she agreed to a meeting when Chris and I went to San Diego in August 2020.
The yacht company chartered a boat ride for us which was amazing, because we could get a real feel for the size of the boat. Not only that but the charter was on the actual boat we were going to use for the wedding. The boat is four times bigger than it needs to be for the size of wedding we are hosting, but in the great state of CA, that is the requirement at this time and the foreseeable future.
I am not sad that I am not getting married in Hawaii. After all angles were considered, it made more sense for many reasons. It was a vast improvement on our destination wedding. It’s cheaper, closer to home and we don’t have to worry about flight protocol.
So, as of today, we are having the wedding in San Diego, CA. However, we do have a backup plan and a backup plan to the backup plan just in case! Keep up with me on social media to see what’s next for us in wedding planning!
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