Who knew planning a destination wedding would be so frustrating?

[HereFishie]

I need to vent and bitch and moan a little here. These tour operators are making me want to go postal. They give us rates for 1 week that are great so we're excited. Then we remind them we still need the 2 wk prices because we want the 2nd wk for our honeymoon. And they come back and tell us there are no departures for the wk after but if we want to go a week earlier than our wedding they can do it. kind of honeymoon happens BEFORE the wedding??

 

So then we think... ok well maybe we could move the entire group back 1 week and have the wedding in the first week and still leave the 2nd week. Ok. yeah sure we can. For $200 more a person to move the departures a mere 4 days before we originally were going to. The reason? Sunday departures are more money.

 

I want to cry I'm so frustrated. I went back to our travel agent and asked her to go back to them and see if they will honour the last quote we got with the earlier dates. I doubt it will work and we'll have to have our honeymoon before our guests show up for our wedding.

[michelle6114]

Are you getting married on a cruise? I'm a little confused "shrug"

[HereFishie]

No our problem is we have people coming from all over the country so we need a few departure locations. Getting everyone to the resort for the wedding has proven to be harder than I thought it would be. We've had problems with not getting all the departure points so we need connectors for those people. We have 3 different dates coming from the tour operators for our guests coming to the hotel which doesn't really work as we want the wedding date to be 2 days before people start to leave.

 

The logistics of having people coming from lots of different places but all going to the same place have been extremely frustrating when dealing with tour operators that only fly out of certain places on certain days.

[frenchie427]

I agree, Destination Weddings are way more work once you get into the details.

Good luck with everything! I hope they figure it out. My friend had a DW in Aruba and it was so worth it!

[michelle6114]

Oh, I see. Is switching destinations out of the question? Or maybe dates?

[HereFishie]

We've changed our date about 5 times already trying to accommodate the dates the tour operators fly. We're probably going to be changing it again from the sounds of it too. We started with a few different resorts before we started down into the details and the nitty gritty... now that we picked our hotel we're having all the issues! Crazy.

 

We've decided that our biggest problem with this planning is that we're focused more on our guests than we have been on ourselves and what we want. My travel agent has emailed Signature vacations and hopefully we'll know tomorrow what we're doing one way or another because we're both so done stressing about this. It should be EASY to plan a destination wedding and we can't even get past getting the darn flights figured out!

[michelle6114]

Ahh, well been there, done that, and all I can say is, do what benefits YOU. We picked a hotel based on accommodating our guest list (lots of little kids) and school schedules. After all that, the kids never did come since the parents decided they couldn't afford it. We still had a blast, but I wonder if we could have picked a cheaper or more romantic place had we not worried about who was supposed to come.

[Melidell]

I feel for you. It was a pain for us, too, first getting the date and then picking the tour company. We actually wound up using two carriers- one for people leaving from the Maritimes and one for everyone else. It's a bit confusing, and we have some people getting there a day before everyone else but it worked out for the best that way. Have you looked into maybe switching resorts for week two- would that make any difference at all? Good luck- I hope it gets figured out for you!

[HereFishie]

We did think of that Melidell but unfortunately its Signature that's the problem because they don't have flights the week after back home. We may have come up with a solution for our guests coming from Kenora & Winnipeg though which is a great relief. They're going to drive down to the states and pick up a cheapo flight down to Cancun and just book the hotel instead of getting a package vacation. Now we just have to worry about our Comox guests...

[vdaybride]

Sounds frustrating indeed, but try to remember this is your day.