Destination Wedding Questions

I guess it depends on what you consider a destination wedding. We got married in a different state about 4 hours from where we lived at the time. It was about 1.5 hours from where my husband grew up and 2 hours from where I grew up. We tried to pick a place kind of in the middle of where both of us were from.

Now to answer your questions.

1. I searched for venues on The Knot and WeddingWire. We did end up touring them in person to pick our venue. We spent a weekend looking at venues. We stayed with my MIL and made the 1.5 drive each way both Saturday and Sunday to look at the venues we were interested in after narrowing down our options to 7 possible choices. I will say we ended up picking the venue I liked the most when I was looking online.

2. The hardest part was if we wanted to meet with a vendor in person we had to travel four hours to do so. This meant we tried to coordinate meeting with different vendors all on the same day. For example, we had our cake tasting at the bakery, meeting with our venue coordinator, and food tasting all in one day so it was a lot of back to back meetings. By the time we got back to our hotel for the night we were both exhausted and over planning. Another thing that was challenging was that we had to heavily rely on reviews (The Knot & WeddingWire) and our venue coordinator's recommendations on vendors because we didn't know anyone in that area and couldn't ask friends or family if they knew vendors they could recommend since they weren't from that area either.

3. So we didn't hire a wedding planner. I wanted to be in control of planning it rather than relying on someone else to handle the planning. I also didn't want to spend the extra money since wedding planners aren't cheap.