There’s a lot to think about when you begin to plan your wedding. One of your first decisions to make will be the location. Do you simply nip down to your local registry office for a quickie wedding, grabbing a couple of strangers off the street to act as witnesses, or do you fly your entire family out to the Caribbean for a sun-soaked celebration? These, of course, are two extremes of wedding location, but if you do fancy jetting off somewhere to do your I dos, here are the pros and cons of getting married abroad.
Pros of getting married abroad
Weather
We all know how inconsistent the British weather is. You book your wedding in July, hoping to get married in the grounds of a beautiful wedding venue in Essex in the glorious sunshine but there’s always the fear that, instead of glorious sunshine, it’ll be bucketing it down. You’ve got far more chance of sunshine if you get married abroad.
Cost
Even taking into consideration the cost of flights and accommodation, getting married abroad is actually cheaper than getting married in the UK (unless you fly everyone out first class and put them up in a 5-star hotel but, on the whole, guests are usually happy to pay their own expenses).
You can invite who you want
When you get married in the UK, you feel obliged to invite everyone, even if it’s just to the evening reception. That annoying woman you sit next to at work, cousins you haven’t seen for decades and everyone else you’d rather not have at your wedding all receive an invitation to your special day.
However, when you get married abroad, you’ll only be inviting people you want to be there. That annoying woman at work won’t be expecting an invitation and therefore won’t be offended by not getting one.
It can be organised for you
You can, of course, organise everything yourself, but if you go through a tour operator, they’ll do it all for you. They might even throw in a few extras such as excursions for free.
More than a day
Weddings are usually over in a day. That means it can go by in a bit of a blur, you don’t get to talk to everyone and before you know it, it’s the next day and it’s all over.
When you get married abroad, it’s much more relaxed. You and your guests will likely be at your destination for a day or more leading up to the wedding and for a few more days afterwards (unless you go on somewhere else for your honeymoon).
This means you get to hang out with your guests without rushing to the next person for a quick ‘hello, thank you for coming’ and your guests also get to know each other.
It’s different
It doesn’t matter how unique you try and make your UK wedding, they all tend to follow the same style and format. The same could be said for barefoot weddings on the beach but you have much more scope to make your wedding day different to everyone else’s when you get married abroad.
Cons of getting married abroad
Weather
Although you’ve got more chance of it being sunny if you get married abroad, there’s not actually any guarantee. Even hot countries get rain sometimes and you’ll be far more miffed if that happens on your wedding day abroad than if it happened while you were getting married in the UK.
Not everyone will be able to make it
Despite one of the advantages of getting married abroad being that you can keep your guest list exclusive, it does mean that not everyone will be able to make your wedding.
For example, some of your guests might not be able to get the time off work, they might be pregnant or have a phobia of flying. You can of course have a UK-based celebration when you get back but getting married abroad means you’ll have to risk some close friends or family not being there on your big day.
Difficult to organise by yourself
As we said in the ‘pros’ section, a tour operator can organise your overseas wedding, but if you like to take control of everything, it can be difficult to organise a wedding abroad.
For example, you might not be able to get personal recommendations for things like caterers, make-up or hair and obviously, you can’t keep nipping over to your chosen destination to keep an eye on things.
On the whole, a destination wedding is a wonderful way to carry out your nuptials – just be aware there are pros and cons of getting married abroad.
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