Destination weddings

A wedding away from home is two jobs that get mistaken for one. There is the wedding, which is a venue, a running order and somebody to marry you. Then there is the travelling: forty people on eleven flights, a morning of transfers that cannot slip by ten minutes, and a week either side that has to work for a two-year-old and an eighty-year-old at once.

The second half is ours. We do not plan weddings and we will not pretend otherwise.

Getting everybody there

Most of this is arithmetic done early. Guests book at different times and at different prices, land across four or five days, and all of them need collecting. So we ask for the list while it is still a rough number, keep the arrivals in one place as people book, and build the transfers from what is actually landing.

The other useful thing is a page of routing advice sent to your guests. It says which connections to avoid and roughly what a sensible fare looks like, so nobody arrives at two in the morning having paid twice what their cousin did. Where a held block or a group fare is worth having we say so, and where it is not we say that instead.

Where everyone sleeps

Rarely one building, and that is usually the better answer anyway. Grandparents want a ground-floor room near the restaurant. Six friends in their twenties want the cheapest bed within walking distance of the party. One property that suits both at once is a rare thing, so we put the core group somewhere that works and everybody else within a short drive.

Tell us early who cannot manage steps, who is coming with a baby, and who is paying for themselves. All three change the shortlist before the budget does.

The morning it happens

The day has one fixed point and everything else queues behind it. We work backwards from the hour on the invitation: when the vehicles leave, how long the road really takes at that time of day, and what happens if one of them does not turn up. Then we add a buffer nobody notices until they need it.

None of that is interesting to plan, and it is most of what we do here. A ceremony that starts late because somebody was optimistic about the road did not have to.

Then your own week

Most couples want to be somewhere else by the second day, and they are right. Once the guests have gone home the trip becomes a honeymoon, which is a different brief and a different set of places: quieter, further, and with nobody’s schedule in it but yours.

We plan that half in the same week we plan the rest, so the two fit together instead of being booked twice.

Good to know

• Send the date and the rough head count first. Everything else follows from those two numbers.
• If you have a planner at the other end, introduce us early. We would rather fit their running order than discover it.
• Ask your guests to send us their flights once they book, not the week before.
• Say who is travelling with children, and how old. It changes which properties we suggest.