Planning wedding from a different state.

I live in Colorado but my wedding is in North Carolina. I left decor with my parents, will ship my dress and some other things, booked as many vendors as I could online and took a trip out there to do tastings, hair and makeup trial and pick out rentals

We planned for a DE/NJ wedding from IL.
It can definitely be a challenge not being able to just pop into see the vendors to discuss things but the internet made that gap bearable. The other nice thing about email communication is theres that paper trail! I think we managed to plan the whole thing with only 2 trips out there. The first we toured venues and booked the photographer. The next we did our tasting.

My friend, we live in Mississippi, had her wedding in Indiana, where she and her husband are from. From what I understood, she just choose to have a small intimate gathering to take away from some of the stress. But she also had relatives in the state that helped her coordinate most things.

I once was planning a destination wedding in Orange Beach, Alabama. What I found most helpful was finding a planner there to handle it all. You may want to look into that as an option, if it is in your budget.

I am currently doing the same. We live in California and wedding will be in Pennsylvania. My tip is get vendors that understand your situation and flexible to your schedule. We have a 3 hour time difference so sometimes are venue/ DJ would stay late to have phone calls. They were also reachable and quick to respond to our emails.

We are planning ours for Florida from New Jersey. Most of the planning so far has been via email, and I’ve been very big on crossing potential vendors off the list if they aren’t timely with their responses. It might be harsh, but since I can’t speak to them in person, I have to use what I can to determine if they’re going to provide what I’m expecting from a business. Fortunately the hotel we’re having the wedding at plans almost everything for us. We just have to tell them what we want and they make it happen. I’m planning on mailing myself a box with wedding stuff (welcome bags, decorations, etc) to myself to arrive at the hotel the day after I arrive. That way I won’t have to pack it in my suitcase or pay for extra luggage.

Live in Chicago and destination wedding in New Orleans. We took a trip to visit the venue, the surrounding area, etc. from there you heavily rely on reviews of other people. I do event planning for a living, so it was all a quick process of 2-3 weeks for me to find all vendors and confirm everything, but I don’t think it was any more stressful than finding vendors in my own town would have been.

I'm in Arizona planning for a Miami wedding and it can be stressful, but I've gone through probably every vendor in the Wedding wire search engine. A practical wedding and offbeatbride are other good sites. You gotta set super organized and try to do everything via research or email/call. Email works better for me since I don't have to coordinate across time zones or use my lunch break for calls. I've also done my planning in bouts. It's best to take breaks, meaning no talks, looking at, nothing wedding. So now I've been engaged 4 months and have most of it planned out except design/decor and florals and I'm looking for a day of coordinator with a design background to help me.

Other tips:

- Get your budget and guest list SET before reaching out to vendors. make sure you add yourselves on the list too. And have any and everything you can think of including tip in the budget. WW has a good feature with that too.

- Plan trips. This is my current hang up. I don't know how often I would need to go and for what missions. I'm trying to calculate if it would be worth spending the money for a partial planner vs day of to go to meetings on our behalf

- Join the facebook group "the wedding connection" MAJOR help