Over the years, I’ve planned a number of destination weddings but back in 2010 I found myself making arrangements for my own.
Having worked in travel for a number of years, I had known for sometime where I wanted to get married, of course, it was abroad but I already had in my head both the country and the very spot. Working in this field, there are certain images of destinations which stick in your mind and the lush beachfront gardens of the Halycon Beach on Choc Bay, Saint Lucia was, for me, one of those very images.
The location of the hotel really appealed to us. The wedding pagoda surrounded by greenery and tropical gardens, framed by a backdrop of the Caribbean Sea was just postcard perfect. That was the first reason why a destination wedding appealed to us – the setting. A location such as this requires very little in the way of decorating to make it wedding ready – these days, we call it Instagramable!
The second reason why we chose the island of St Lucia for our weddingmoon (combined wedding and honeymoon) is the weather. In January when everyone is cold and miserable, what could be better than jetting off to a warm Sunny Caribbean climate to get married!? Looking back, it was a January like no other. In fact, going away in the winter has recently been something Chris has said he’d like to do again.
We took a number of friends and family with us to St Lucia. Some stayed with us at at the Halcyon, others stayed nearby at another hotel. The flexibility was just what we needed. In my experience it could easily have been quite awkward asking people to not only spent money on a holiday to see you get married but to dictate where they needed to stay and therefore how much they needed to spent could have been a deal breaker! But this way, our guests could choose to have a more independent holiday and just come to the wedding on a day pass if that’s what they wanted to do. Everyone got to have the holiday they wanted and that was important to us.
The whole thing was very much stress free. A wedding coordinator worked with us in the UK to decide which finishes and extras we wanted – so by the time we arrived in St Lucia, it was just a case of sitting down on day 1 of the holiday to finalise the finer details and sign paperwork ahead of the big day. At this meeting we met our local wedding coordinator who was our go to contact for anything we needed and we also got to sample all the different flavours of wedding cake over a glass of champagne – yum! Again, this meeting meant that we could enjoy the days leading up to the wedding carefree – and so could our parents, which was another concern. They all thoroughly enjoyed their holidays and the coming together on our wedding day for the ceremony, following champagne reception and then later in the evening after the photographs, a private dinner. That was another beauty of planning our destination wedding – it could have been anything we wanted from the most understated and relaxed to the most elaborate and formal but ultimately we had exactly what we wanted.
The really nice thing about our weddingmoon was that after the wedding day (day 6 of the holiday) at the end of the first week, we said our goodbyes to our friends and travelling 20 minutes up the coast to stay at a sister property for our honeymoon week. This worked well as this hotel was very different to the first and provided a completely different week in contrast to the first.
The whole thing cost less than the average price of a UK wedding (at the time) and for our money we got both our wedding and honeymoon included. To this day we wouldn’t change a thing and would recommend a destination wedding to couples looking for a beautiful location, stress free planning and value for money.
For advice about planning your own destination wedding, give me a call. I’d love to help bring your dream day to life.
Louise
