Destination wedding in the Caribbean. Where do I start?

Hi, congratulations. For my Lapland wedding next week I started with a long trawl through the internet. Then I looked at available venues and found which ones I could deal with direct who had their own coordinators who would help with everything. Same wedding. Half the cost. So I would say reading everything to find all options is worth the time first. Don't forget TripAdvisor too. Good luck.

Congratulations and welcome to Hitched, HappyBlueDecor494.

First off I can't really help as I'm having a UK wedding, but we holidayed at Sandals La Toc in St Lucia last year and they're really big on weddings. From what I gather, contact them directly and they organise everything for you - from photographers to meals to make up to licenses.

From the reviews I've read, they're very good for the most part.

Good luck and keep us updated with what you do!

Well, at least you have plenty of time to prepare. Mind you, it'll probably soon creep up before we all know it!!

I can't really help on the wedding front but have an idea for accommodation. If you look on Tripadvisor you can sort the accommodation in order of ranking, then when looking at each you can see the average price. Here's a link if it helps.

Thanks for the advice guys.

We've pretty much settled on the wedding in the Dominican Republic (recommendations welcome!) then on to St Lucia for the honeymoon. Having plenty of time to plan is great, except we cannot get any firm figures for at least a year, probably 2 which makes things even trickier for guests and numbers.

We're seriously considering a Thompson wedding package, anyone got any experience of them? I've heard good and bad but they are certainly competitive!

Thanks again,

Paul

We were engaged in the Dominican in Punta Cana and it was beautiful! I'd definitely recommend checking it out. We stayed at the Dreams hotel which I loved but if you have it in the budget to go to a Sandals or a Beaches which are a little pricier, then I would look into those as they're 5 star and very popular for weddings. It does make it difficult that you can't get any specific prices for your guests until about a year from the wedding date- I'm getting married in Jamaica this coming October so I ran into this as well. But I feel that as long as you let everyone know that you're planning a destination wedding they can start saving until you get hard numbers, that's fine. People can always go on booking websites or the hotel's website and plug in random dates just to get ideas for now. As far as a wedding planner, you can hire your own but usually hotels have an on-site wedding planner thats included in your wedding package.

Congrats!

I found this blog useful, its someone's story of how they organised etc, but its useful for the details/venues!

Kelly and Ben's Beach Wedding - Caribbean

Looks like the venue sort everything out, but they bought some extra stuff with them.

Hi happy blue I had the same questions as you when looking at a Caribbean wedding. The prices didn't change much from one year to the next I found. We have opted for a Thomson/ Hayes and Jarvis (part of the tui group) in Jamaica in April this year. All my dealings so far have been direct with the the hotel wedding coordinators as the wedding package we have comes direct from the hotel. I don't think you can go wrong with a wedding in the Caribbean ? Happy planning Wendy

Hi HappyBlueDecor494,

We're also just starting the process of arranging a wedding in the Caribbean. We've agreed on the October half term week in 2017.

We've got it easy in some ways as we're not having many guests and we're comfortable that the people invited will pay for their flight/hotel package. But we also still don't know where to start......

We've been to Thompson and also Virgin, for the Caribbean we actually found that Virgin has the best selection of hotels/locations and presented the wedding packages in a format we could understand.

What I'm struggling with is knowing what one island has to offer over another, looking through the brochures I'll pick out a hotel that looks nice but then another that doesn't look as nice is priced higher - which is where I get confused.

We also have the issue of my partner's ex wife not allowing his children to come with us but that's a whole other conversation !

Let me know how you get on, I'd be happy to swap experiences on this :-)