Planning a destination wedding can appear first sight to be a hell of a lot more complex than having a wedding back home, where everything will be so much more familiar in terms of typical prices and how things are generally organized. As a result, packages are a very popular way to approach planning a destination wedding as you don’t need to worry about every detail of the wedding and you know what the price is going to be from the start. In this post we will talk about how we find things work out when we plan a wedding based on one of our wedding packages, so that you will have a better idea of what to expect.
We publish a full description of a Porto wedding package here, with a total price and a list of what is included – it is an off-the-shelf wedding and we thing it is excellent value for money and truly the simplest way to plan your wedding. The truth is though that we pretty much never organize a wedding according to our package, rather it works out more as a starting point – a base model that can be modified as much or as little as required.
Our package can be used at a several different venues, so the first step is always deciding on which venue works best for your requirements: this means looking at things like how near to Porto/the airport do you want to be? How many guests will there be? Do you want an outdoor wedding? Do you require accommodation on site for your guests? What sort of vibe are you looking for (contemporary, laid back, rustic etc etc)? It is a long list, but before we can do anything else we need to get the venue right.
Once we have the venue then we can look at what parts of the wedding package needs to be modified to get things exactly how you want them. Experience tells us that frequently there are several modifications required, but that ultimately, we do not stray too far from the original price as one add-on here will be compensated by a cost-saving somewhere else. As wedding planners, we have really learnt that our wedding package is rarely more than a starting point and a great indicator of what you will be spending on a destination wedding in northern Portugal. When we started publicizing our wedding package, we thought that it would be a time-saving device for couples who just wanted to avoid having to make a load of choices, but what we have found is that most couples want to avoid having to make certain choices, but really want to actively choose those elements of their wedding that are most important to them. The point that we would really like to make here is that this is in fact a great way to plan your destination wedding – you can leave a lot of your wedding for us to run in a way that we know works incredibly well, but you can tinker with the parts that you have a strong vision for. Once you have communicated your vision to us then we can pull the whole thing together to make the perfect wedding package for you!
