If you find yourself newly engaged and wondering how to plan a destination wedding, you’ve come to the right place. That was my situation in 2024—my then-boyfriend and I had just become fiancés, and we knew we wanted to have an intimate wedding abroad. As we started to do our research and plan out our timeline, we quickly realized that we weren’t going to have time to see any potential venues in person. Would it be crazy to plan our destination wedding from afar, without ever visiting our venue? Maybe! But did we have a choice? Unfortunately, no!
Below, learn how we planned our destination wedding remotely from New York City, and everything we learned along the way.
Decide on the location for your destination wedding
The first step in planning your destination wedding is to choose the location for your big day. It can be somewhere special to you as a couple, or meaningful for your family or heritage. It can also be completely arbitrary—I studied abroad in Bologna, Italy, and during spring break my now husband and I traveled to Tuscany for a long weekend. Sitting together, overlooking the rolling hills and sipping wine, we looked at each other and said, “I’d get married here.” And so we did (12 years later).
There are, of course, many factors to consider when choosing the location of your destination wedding. You will need to think about the time of year: what will the weather be like? Are there any local events happening during that time that could impact lodging, availability, or price? Is the region easily accessible year-round?
Once you narrow in on a location and time frame, start making a list of potential venues in the area to reach out to.
Narrow down the list to the venues that feel like “you”
Though we knew where we wanted to get married for a long time, choosing the venue itself was a more difficult task. I started with a simple Google search for the best wedding venues in Tuscany, and clicked through many results before stumbling upon an article by Architectural Digest that cited one venue as “a subdued choice for low-key brides”—which felt like it captured exactly what we were going for. I immediately bookmarked it to show my fiancé, and after reading reviews of the venue and a thorough social media stalk of their accounts, decided to reach out for more information. Something about The Lazy Olive Villa just felt right.
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