How to Add Local Flair to Your Destination Wedding
As destination wedding planners, we often find ourselves on the road or in flight to produce our clients’ events in dreamy destinations around the country and the world. Though planning a wedding in a new location can offer unique challenges, it also creates an opportunity to feature the destination in various ways during the wedding weekend. How do we do that exactly? Here are some of our favorite ways!
In the Design
For many of these destinations, nothing will quite do the local vistas justice until guests can finally lay eyes on them themselves, but we like to give them a sneak peek of the beautiful weekend that’s ahead of them by incorporating hints of the location in various design elements. We’ve included watercolor landscapes on save-the-dates. We’ve hinted at the venue’s tile pattern or garden gates on invitation suites. We’ve included local flora and fauna in the watercolor artwork featured throughout the weekend. Many guests will start to put two and two together once they arrive at the wedding location and realize that they’ve seen some these elements before (in the save the date, or invitation suite, and/or on the wedding website). But even if a guest doesn’t notice the exact elements, they most definitely sense an overall cohesiveness to the design.
In the Activities
A destination wedding weekend is just that, a weekend, not just a day! This means that guests usually need some ideas for activities to fill the additional time outside of the wedding day. If the destination is a favorite of our clients’, then we usually ask them for some of their favorite restaurants, bars and attractions to provide to guests. If the location is new to them as well, then we do some deep diving to find the best spots the destination has to offer!
We usually include this information on the wedding website as well as in the guests’ welcome gifts. We often go a step further to really highlight these locations by creating a custom watercolor map that lists the venue as well as these local favorites! It provides a fun way for guests to plan the rest of their weekend and also makes for a beautiful keepsake.
In the Goodies
We are true believers that the best way to get the real local feel of a destination is to try some local treats! Because many of our clients provide guests with welcome gifts upon arrival, this is one of our favorite spots to highlight these local goodies. You can often find us paying the local grocer a visit to pick up local beers, bakery treats or snacks to pack up for arriving guests. Sometimes we also highlight these treats for guests to try on the wedding day, by including in the tabletop design or as a late-night surprise takeaway.
The destinations that our clients select for their weddings are always meaningful. So we make sure to do each destination justice and highlight it throughout the whole weekend, from beginning to end.
