It’s Best To Be Planning At Least 8 – 12 Months In Advance!
Update: Recommended to Plan and Book a minimum of 12 – 18 months in advance
As we’re updating this answer, which is currently in the summer of 2013, our overall experience with planning destination weddings spanning back to 2009 until now tells us that you need to start your destination wedding planning at least 12 – 18 months in advance for “Wedding Groups” and approximately 8 – 12 months if you don’t plan on having a group minimum of 10 or more guests join you at destination.
The reason for requiring more planning time is that many of the vacation suppliers, resorts, cruise lines, and hotel companies are starting to catch on to this huge growth and demand and many of them now offer their services much earlier to meet this demand.
For example: One of our Preferred Vacation Suppliers provides us Group Wedding Package Rates approximately 2 years in advance. So to sum it up, if a future wedding couple were to contact us now looking to get married two years from now, we would be able to provide them a group quoted rate, as well as book their destination wedding 2 years out.
If you were to ask this same question 5 years ago this answer would not be the same as if you asked this today (2103). Years ago we would have reiterated the industry standard time frame to start planning your destination wedding, which would have been between 8 – 12 months. However, fast forward, and with the massive popularity and growth in weddings being performed outside your country, we needed to adapt quickly to this demand to re-think the amount of time required to reflect the industry standard when it came to planning select weddings at destination.
Please keep in mind that when you start to question the amount of time you need to start your planning, our recommendations are based on couples looking to have a destination wedding at a vacation resort, hotel, or cruise ship. The requirements for a independent ceremony at destination may be different based on the individual wedding planning services you may be looking to deal with. Our best advice is that the moment you become engaged and decide on having a wedding outside your country of residence, contact us and we can provide you with the best information to help you decide when it’s appropriate to start your planning.
Why we refer to Wedding Groups versus Individual Weddings under 10 Guests!
To be completely honest with you, in order to explain why our vacation and cruise suppliers base their criteria on Wedding Groups and not on individual weddings would take a long winded detailed explanation that would require a phone call. So we won’t place the information here on that topic, but if you wish to have us explain this to you, we would be more than happy to do so. Please visit our “Contact” page and drop us an email or give us a call if you happen to live in our Winnipeg area.