Destination Wedding Events Are Wedding Design Opportunities
Many professional wedding planners consider destination wedding events an attractive way to enhance their wedding consulting business, showcase their wedding design talents, and explore the exciting world of theme weddings at new and exotic wedding venues. It’s true that notable destination wedding planner careers and lucrative wedding planner businesses have been built by energetic entrepreneurs with a gift for making over mundane wedding facilities with eye-popping wedding décor. Some start by providing specific wedding design elements such as spectacular lighting, fantastic floral design, or one-of-a-kind wedding tents for luxury theme weddings. Others make the move to wedding events from party planning with the benefit of a loyal client list. But starting a wedding planning business from scratch has built-in risks, even for planners with a propensity for wedding design, a passion for planning a wedding with style, and a familiarity with world weddings. Destination weddings where the wedding timeline starts at least a year in advance and the wedding budget can’t always be predicted with precision present daunting challenges, as well as appealing opportunities. So answering the question ‘how can I become a wedding planner for destination wedding events?’ begins with careful self-assessment. Unsurprisingly, the items requiring the most urgent analysis involve wedding business issues, not wedding design matters. Costs often outweigh benefits, so it’s smart for planners getting started, and couples getting married, to do the math before deciding that a destination wedding event or wedding planner job is right for their situation.
Test Your Capacity for Local Theme Weddings before Taking the Destination Wedding Leap
If adding destination wedding events to your portfolio of planning services makes business sense, the next step is confirming your capacity for distant theme weddings by planning mini-destination wedding events close to home. Matching well-researched area venues to prospective clients, making group bookings for guest accommodations and activities, and employing elements of destination wedding décor such as specialty wedding tents, all provide practice at the tasks required by distant destination wedding events, where wedding design may really mean producing a weekend extravaganza for a critical out-of-town audience. From local venues, it’s logical to move on to domestic destinations including wine country, big-city wedding locations, and historic inn venues. Driving trips with a well-planned itinerary are essential to self-education; developing relationships at a variety of venues, even before you have clients, makes the travel time worthwhile. Remember: Theme weddings are big business at most destinations, and wedding décor is often built in, particularly at stunning outdoor venues where custom wedding tents provide protection while nature takes care of the rest. For sophisticated clients with a taste for multiculturalism, indoor wedding tents inspired by Indian wedding style can transform the most mundane hotel ballroom into a destination experience that guests won’t forget.
Course Video Tutorial: ’An International Event Designer Teaches Destination Weddings II’ (21:14)
Dominic Mitchell is the cofounder of Raj Tents, a Los Angeles-based company that provides wedding tents, event décor, and theme environments conjuring images of India in custom wedding décor for destination wedding events throughout the USA and around the world. A native of the United Kingdom, Dominic possesses a signature style gleaned from years as a diplomat’s son growing up on the Indian subcontinent. His destination wedding design expertise is both an expression and an extension of this experience, focused by entrepreneurial energy and proven by his success creating unique event environments for such international celebrities as Victoria and David Beckham, Goldie Hawn, Denzel Washington, Salma Hayek, Hugh Hefner, Sarah McLachlan, and Richard Branson. In this course video tutorial, Dominic teaches Members how to assess, enhance, and promote their ability to produce destination wedding events close to home, at a variety of domestic venues, and at international resorts where unique wedding design, exotic wedding décor, and four-day theme weddings are business as usual. He also gives Members practical tips on how to make bad-weather contingency plans, manage long-distance arrangements, and motivate everyone involved in a destination event to perform at their best, or enjoy themselves fully. The tutorial is the second in a two-part series.
Learn 12 essential elements of wedding design, planning theme weddings, and producing destination wedding events:
- What it takes to succeed as a destination wedding planner
- Two distinct types of destination weddings from the planner's point of view
- 10 destination wedding principles for new wedding planners
- Five business questions experienced planners should ask themselves first
- The top 25 challenges of destination weddings and how to meet each one
- Guidelines for qualifying clients
- Guidelines for selecting venues
- Guidelines for managing vendors
- Guidelines for booking group accommodations and activities
- Guidelines for paying gratuities at non-USA locations
- How wedding tents work as décor and protection
- A four-week driving itinerary to explore destination venues on the East Coast
