How to Plan a Wedding from Abroad

Chris and Maebellyne booked our Full Wedding Planning service. With their busy careers and their Zurich location, they needed help with all aspects of their wedding plans including finding the perfect location for their UK destination wedding.

After months of planning, their beautiful wedding took place in Nottinghamshire in the UK and in this very special post, Maebellyne shares her experience and advice about how to plan a wedding from abroad.

Over to Maebellyne....

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"Chris and I first met in Nottingham so it made perfect sense to get married right in the heart of Robin Hood county. We wanted somewhere that would be easy for our friends and family in the UK to travel to but also a desirable location for those travelling from abroad.

Wedding planning is hard enough at times but add to that the complication of living in Switzerland while planning a wedding in the UK and you end up with a logistical nightmare. To help other couples enjoy the planning experience and take stress-levels down a notch, we’re sharing a few tips we picked up along the way to our big day.

Hire a LOCAL wedding planner

Find out who organises weddings at your chosen destination and ask about the different services they offer before you do anything else. Hiring someone who has contacts with local suppliers and is familiar with the legal requirements for getting married in the area is invaluable. This will save you a lot of time on research and reference checking.

We initially approached Val to help us find a venue and then we quickly realised Benessamy’s Full Wedding Planning services would make our lives a lot easier. Although both our families live in the UK, they still lived a fair bit away from Nottingham so the last thing we wanted was to put any burden on them. Val became our eyes and ears on the ground - popping up at venues, making enquiries and meeting with suppliers when we couldn’t. Working with her meant we had access to her expertise and a tight network of suppliers she trusted.

Visit in person.

Between Google, Tripadvisor, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and a whole host of other sites, you can get a pretty good idea of what places look like. However don’t book anything until you’ve actually seen the venue or the church in person and have explored the local area.

Understanding how the venue is laid out will help you make decisions on how to make your entrance, how to entertain and mingle with your guests or even where the cake goes! Knowing what hotels are nearby, parking availability and distances between locations is also essential information you’ll need to find out and share with guests later on.

Leave enough time for paperwork

Make sure you have plenty of time to sort out marriage documents. Depending on the country and your citizenship, there might be a few things you need to do or additional documents you need to provide as part of the application process. Don’t leave it until the last minute to tackle the boring bits of getting married. The last thing you’d want is to plan an elaborate wedding and then realise that you’re not legally allowed to marry because you ignored a bureaucratic procedure.

Send invitations early.

Give your guests as much time to plan as possible especially if you’re asking them to fly out for your wedding. The more notice you give people, the more likely they will be able to save for the trip and plan around their own holidays and work commitments.

Use the technology available to you.

With all the technology available to us these days, there are different tools that really make planning easier. We used videocalls with our suppliers since we couldn’t meet with them.

Val also got us to create our own secret Pinterest board which helped us figure out and explain our vision for the day. It’s not always easy articulating how the flowers, cake, or stationery should look like so it’s handy being able to simply share a Pinterest board with suppliers.

Chris and I run a startup company called Clever Biscuit on top of our full-time jobs which made it bit difficult to keep track of all the emails flying around. So we also used Google Docs to communicate and plan the finer details of the wedding with Val. She could easily share suppliers’ contact info with us and we set up spreadsheets with guest lists, to-do lists, seating charts, schedules, etc. for her to pick up later on.

Tone down the DIY

You may have brilliant ideas for handmade centrepieces, corsages and bouquets but think long and hard about how you’re going to transport what you’ve made and what you’re going to do with your creations after the guests are long gone. The savings you make could easily be outweighed by shipping costs not to mention the likelihood of things breaking or getting lost in transit.

As much as we enjoy being creative (I wanted to hide a GoPro in my bouquet at one point!), find other outlets for your creative juices. In our case, we focused our energies on building a kick-ass website instead!

Don’t sweat the small stuff

It’s natural to want everything to be perfect on your wedding day but Murphy’s law says anything that can go wrong will go wrong. The weather can turn in an instant or there might be last minute cancellations but you need to just roll with the punches. Breathe. The most important detail is that you’re getting married, everything else is non-essential.

Planning a wedding from afar made the whole process trickier than normal but it was absolutely worth all the effort to see everyone we love drinking and laughing together. In the end, all that mattered was that we got married and had fun doing it.

Maebellyne

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Thanks Maebellyne!

You can see more photos from Maebellyne and Chris's beautiful Norwood Park wedding here If you would like to find out more about our wedding planning services, please get in touch and book a complimentary consultation.

Val x

Photography by Eleri Tunstall Photography