Destination wedding question
My fiancé and I met when we were living in the mountains of Virginia, so we want to have a mountain wedding. Plus I’ve just always had this idea of getting married with a beautiful mountain scene in the background.
We’re living in Charlotte, NC now, where it’s pretty flat, so we’ve been thinking about getting married in Asheville, which is a beautiful place (I want to live there one day) about 2.5 hours west of Charlotte.
Lo and behold, my father’s already trying to nudge me in a different direction - specifically, Richmond, where he and my mom live and where I went to high school.
For starters, he says that traveling to Asheville would be too difficult on our guests. Most of my family will have to travel anyway, but the Asheville airport is a smaller one and would be about 20% more expensive on average. Most of my fiancé’s family lives within a 4 hour drive of Asheville so it won’t be a problem for them.
He also said that I should think about my friends in Richmond, which is a 6 hour drive from Asheville (compared to 5 hours to Charlotte). Instead of taking an afternoon off to come to my wedding, he says, it now becomes a weekend event. My feeling is that someone’s going to have to travel, anyway, so we might as well just have the wedding in a place where we want it.
Now, I know that most of my close friends who had to travel would be happy to make the journey, but I’d like to make it as easy as possible. I was hoping that my friends would see it as an opportunity for a vacation, but now he’s making me feel like a bridezilla (I’ve barely even begun planning!)
So, for those of you who have done a destination wedding, how did you make it easy on your guests? I’m planning to try and get a group discount for a hotel in Asheville so that part won’t be too expensive, and for people like my MOH I’ll pay for her plane ticket in a heartbeat. I was thinking of putting my Richmond guests in touch with each other so they could carpool and maybe sending the group a gas card.
Thoughts?