Tips to Plan a Low Budget Destination Wedding in Europe!

Aug 26

If it's feeling impossible to plan a destination wedding in Europe on a low budget and you're worried constantly about breaking the bank, this is for you. Pulling from my experience as a destination wedding planner, I'm sharing my five need to know tips for planning an affordable destination wedding in Europe, from a wedding Tuscany to Lake Garda; from the Amalfi Coast to a Portugal destination wedding; a wedding in Santorini to Spain and beyond! Read on or watch the video below!

Firstly, what is “low budget” is subjective. For one person, spending $40,000 on their wedding could seem super cheap and to another person that could seem like all the money in the world. It makes it really hard to answer - are destination weddings cheaper than back home?

Regardless of what you want to spend, there are cost saving strategies that you can use to keep your overall costs in control and avoid spending on unnecessary things.

Charge your guests for accommodations
This is the number one cost saving tip that I have given that’s saved couples over $20,000 on a destination wedding. Let me explain. When you have a destination wedding, your guests are expecting to pay for their flights and pay for their accommodations. It is totally within the realm of etiquette that you would not be covering those costs for your guests. So the huge key that you can use here is get a venue that has accommodations attached to it. When you pick your wedding venue, there might be 30 rooms on site and your guests can stay in those rooms just like they would stay in a regular hotel. Now, you can set the price for those rooms, so look at your wedding budget, look at what other hotels in the area cost and set an appropriate cost for each room.
Then your guests will be able to stay in that room, pay you, and you'll actually recoup those funds, which oftentimes makes your venue $0 (because the costs that your guests are paying toward the rooms end up subsidizing the entire fee for the venue rental). For some helpful examples of this, check out my list of cheapest wedding venues in Tuscany!
You can also use the same strategy to have guests opt into excursions. So if you want to have a multi-day destination wedding, and one day you want to do a wine tasting excursion, you don't have to pay for that for your guests. You can say, “Hey, there's an optional wine tasting on day three. It's a hundred dollars per guest. Let us know if you'd like to come.” Then they are paying for that excursion themselves so you don't have to pay for them.
Leverage your venue’s existing beer and wine bar package
This is one of the biggest cultural differences in weddings in America versus abroad.
Here in the States, we kind of love an open bar - like a FULL open bar with beer, wine, and all the liquors. But abroad, the packages they have available are a little different. You're typically going to see beer and wine served during dinner. During cocktail hour there might be a limited alcohol menu (like an aperitivo if you're in Italy, for example). So maybe there are wines and an Aperol Spritz available. Then after dinner, you have the option to have an “after dinner bar” where you can open up the bar beyond just beer and wine. Now, I see a lot of Americans that we help plan destination weddings with abroad, wanting to have an open bar from cocktail hour all the way through the end of the night. And price wise, it's kind of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's just not the way that their packages are made, and so they end up charging you a lot of money to be able to stock those bars with full liquor for the whole night. The cost to upgrade into a full bar is generally between $75 and $100 per person. So my advice to you, is just lean into the cultural experience. Pick whatever bar package they have, and then you can do the “after dinner bar” with liquor when dancing starts.
Lower your guest count
When couples wonder how to plan a destination wedding on a budget, I tell them the guest count is the biggest toggle that you can use to bring your wedding budget down.
The truth is, it's a lot of money to feed people, give them drinks, and have enough chairs and rentals for them. Now, off the bat, generally you can see between a 15% and 30% drop off from the number of people that you invite to your destination wedding to the number of people that actually come. That percentage significantly lowers, however, if you're inviting less than 50 people. The reason being, those 50 people are probably already your VVV- IPS and they're likely all going to make the time and space to go to your destination wedding. So if you have over 50 people, you can expect that 15 to 30% drop off to kick in for you, which is great, but we don't want to count on the “no” RSVPs to lower your guest count alone. So we need to drop your invited guest count as low as possible. That's the number of people that we're inviting to the wedding. And we need to cull down… ruthlessly. Okay, maybe not THAT ruthlessly, but we need to get it as low as possible. Why? Because for a multi-day destination wedding, you can expect to spend between $500 and $800 per person. This is just in the food beverage and rentals alone. So lowering your guest count, the less guests you'll have, the less money you'll spend.
Use the free stuff from your venue and caterer
What does that mean? I want you to leverage the free stuff that already is being provided by your venue and your caterer. Things that your venue might already provide are basic chairs, tables, linens, lighting and AV units. Things your caterer might bring are basic white china and glassware, silverware and napkins. If you want to have a low cost wedding, use that stuff, meaning we're not upgrading anything. For example, if you upgrade the lights beyond whatever lights the venue already has to let's say chandeliers, or you upgrade your tabletop to a colored goblet and a printed floral tablecloth and gold flatware, that's super fun if you have the cash to burn, but it's a bunch of unnecessary costs that are going to drive up your total budget.
I always say, there is a reason that you're flying so far to this venue. It's probably already inherently beautiful, so I highly recommend to keep costs low, we lean into the beauty of your venue and the landscape. The architecture is probably amazing, and the view is probably fantastic, so lean into that and let that do the heavy lifting for your decor. Then from there, you can use the string lights that the venue might have, or maybe we can bring in some string lights for a very low cost. If you need to, add some candles, BADABING BADABOOM it's beautiful, it's done.

5. Limit the amount you spend on a wedding planner

Yeah, coming from a wedding planner, this is how much I believe in this tactic. When you have a destination wedding, you have two options. Hire a planner that's local to your destination, or you can hire one that's local to you and fly them over.

That's awesome. If you can hire someone local to you, since you share the same culture, the same language, the same time zone, and the same currency. However, it's super costly to bring them over to your destination with you. Now, hiring a wedding planner in your destination is obviously less expensive because they already live there, but if you're hiring a full service planner there, that's still a lot of money. On top of the money you're spending on that planner, there might now be a misalignment between you and them because you don't share the same culture, language, time zone, or currency. So yeah, you might still need help. Ideally, you're just hiring a planner that gives you just the amount of help that you need to get the job done so that you can preserve the rest of your budget for the actual wedding costs themselves. Shameless plug, I have a package designed just for this. It's designed for wedding budgets as low as $30,000.It’s kind of the sweet spot if you want to work with an American planner without the price of flying them over. Check-out our partial destination wedding planning package here!

BONUS NUGGET!

I want to give you a bonus nugget. As you are budgeting for your wedding, before you put money down on anything, I want you to make a priorities list of all the things that are important to you from most important to least important. Agree with your partner on the order, and then lock that in. As you start moving and spending money on your vendors, book them in order of priority to you, so you're spending more on the ones that are most important and you're booking them first. Then if you find that you've gone over budget at any point, whatever was on the bottom of your list, it's got to go.

The three biggest items that I see couples end up taking out of their wedding budget to save money are transportation for their guests, videography and rental upgrades.

Now, you have these tips to make sure that you're reducing the cost of your wedding, keep it as low cost and affordable as possible to avoid going over budget and having destination wedding regrets, but you still need to figure out how much is it realistically going to cost for the expectations that you have before you start booking things. For more price transparency, check out my video on destination weddings in Italy cost with a full budget breakdown!

I highly recommend doing a budget exercise before you book a venue because you don't want to find out the hard way that you're going to go over budget. So to set yourself up for budgeting success, download my guide: Estimate the Cost of Your Destination Wedding in Europe or Mexico before booking a venue. Get the guide below!