Once the excitement from the proposal settles down a bit, it’s time to get serious about the wedding planning. Many couples want to send out their save the dates immediately, but there is a destination wedding timeline for a reason!
First thing’s first: where are you tying the knot? Start researching your location options if you’re not planning a local wedding. Destination weddings range from being destination only for the guests – i.e. only the couple lives in the wedding city – to every single person hopping on a flight and heading halfway across the world. Literally, “the world’s your oyster!”
Once your destination city is determined, you’ll need to narrow down the venue of course. And you can’t do that until you have a solid idea of your guest list. Something else you can’t do without that guest list? Send a destination wedding save the date! Not only will you need the guest list, but all the household addresses too.
So, will it be a ballroom to accommodate several hundred guests? An intimate seated dinner at a high end restaurant? An outdoor fete under the stars? Determining the venue will help with designing your destination wedding save the date, too.
Many of the most popular wedding venues fill up a year or more in advance, so that will factor in to your destination wedding timeline as well. If you’re looking for a peak season date, keep in mind you will likely find yourself with a longer engagement. It gives you more time to plan though, which isn’t a bad thing!
With all of that said, when to send save the dates for a destination wedding?
We typically recommend that you send save the dates 8 months to a year before the wedding date. There are several reasons for this destination wedding timeline:
- Earlier is not always better. We like to say if someone can grow a human (i.e. not be pregnant when they get the save the date and be holding a newborn when the wedding happens), that’s probably a bit too long. Giving people notice is a great thing, but with everyone’s busy lives, too much notice can backfire.
- Sending within that 8 months to a year timeline means they can act on the information. Flights and hotels can be planned at that point. If you send it two years out, they can’t do anything with that yet and it might just get lost in the shuffle of life.
- Your information is able to be more final. Crazy things can happen. We’ve seen it in our many years in business – restaurants close or venues change policies or someone’s job schedule materially changes. Sending too far ahead can backfire on you, and you’d hate to have to send out an amended save the date.
- You don’t want there to be too much time between the save the date, the invitation, and the wedding. Pacing them a few months apart up to the wedding date is the perfect way to keep the information in front of your guests so it doesn’t get backburnered.
At Dodeline Design, we’ve been creating custom and semi-custom destination wedding save the dates for couples since 2009. We would love to help you with yours! Reach out to us anytime.
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