The cake. The dress. The tux. The guests. Who has time to plan anything else when you’ve got a wedding to organize? Even the most romantic of vacations — a honeymoon — can seem downright exhausting to plan if you’ve got a big wedding in the works. Read this article for quick tips on how to make your honeymoon plan fun and easy.
Should You Stay or Should You Go?
First of all, you need to decide if you want something closer to home or a more exotic location. Just because traditionally, honeymoons are thought to take place on tropical beaches or far-away paradises, this doesn’t mean that you and your amour need to rack up your airline miles. Plenty of great honeymoon destinations might be within a half-hour drive of your home. The point of the honeymoon is for you to seclude yourselves in a love nest, and a bed-and-breakfast just off a country lane might do the trick just as well as a swanky resort a thousand miles away.
Pick Your Budget
You can plan all you want, but you’ve got to have the beans to pay for it too. Even a foreign destination honeymoon can be planned on a budget, as long as you know in advance what you’re able to pay. Plenty of newlyweds start their married lives in debt, which is stressful and not very practical, so if your budget is limited but your heart screams “Bali,” consider setting up a honeymoon registry. Like a bridal registry, this is a way to let your friends and family know what to give you as a gift — in this case, a cash donation to your honeymoon travel fund. This might also cut down on the number of toaster ovens and unnecessary crockery sets you receive.
Choose Your Dates
The traditional way, of course, is to leave on your honeymoon right away after the wedding. But we don’t have to follow tradition unless we choose to, and plenty of couples are opting to wait a few weeks (or even months) to embark on their honeymoons so that they can get optimal dates and availability for their honeymoon plans. Just because the cruise you’ve got your mind set on doesn’t depart on the date of your wedding doesn’t mean you should write it off your honeymoon plans.
Know How Much Time You Have to Plan
If you’ve got a giant wedding to plan which is going to leave you with zero time for considering which island on the Caribbean is right for you, you might consider cruises or find an all-inclusive vacation where most of the planning is done for you. Or, if you’ve already got the gear for it, for example, a camping trip might be easier to plan than a foreign vacation — especially if you need to deal with passports and visas before you fly. If your wedding is in the warmer months, consider a road-trip honeymoon. This type of travel requires almost no planning which can be a relief after months of planning your wedding. Keep in mind though that road tripping isn’t especially romantic and you might end up spending your first night as a married couple in a motel. On the other hand, traveling by car can be awfully interesting depending on where you stop!
Talk to Your Soon-to-Be Spouse About Vacation Preferences
Is he a big museum buff but you like soaking up the sun? Is she up for a party weekend in Vegas type but you’d rather camp and sit with your sweetheart by the fire? Do you both like whitewater rafting or skiing? Some of these things will have been discussed before the Big Day, of course, but you might find that your partner has a different idea of what a great honeymoon will be like. Twilight strolls or adventure sports? If only one of you is in charge of planning the honeymoon, make sure you’ve got the other one’s input before you charge the travel arrangements to your credit card. You also need to discuss what pace of travel you’d like to have on your honeymoon. If you’ve both been under a lot of stress before the wedding, with planning, work and family arrangements, the honeymoon is a great time to chill out before going back to the real world as husband and wife. But, if you’re ponying up the bucks for a globe-trotting adventure, you and your partner need to talk about the rate of your travels so that you’ll see everything you want to without trying to do too much.
About the Author: Jamie Chen is a wedding planner from Vancouver. She’s a big fan of destination weddings, but her own wedding took place in a backyard, followed by a short-but-sweet honeymoon skiing in the Rockies.
These are all wonderful suggestions to help couples explore their options and decide what to do. It can all be so overwhelming!