How much does it cost to get married abroad?

Along with most couples, one of the first things we had to "talk about" was how much our wedding was going to cost us and whether we could afford what we wanted. There is lots of reading material about UK wedding costs, but as we are planning to get married in Italy, there was little about the costs of weddings abroad.

One of the reasons we decided to get married in Italy was to reduce costs. Lots of my friends had wonderful weddings but had spent a fortune and many of the articles we read about costs were initially really terrifying. 

Magazines such as Brides Magazine and You and Your Wedding have regular features which break down the cost of getting married. Showing everything from the average amount a couple pay on wedding clothing, rings and tiaras to costs of hiring a venue and going on a honeymoon. Even Mintel concludes that the cost of an average UK wedding is £21,000. 

My brother's wedding in Fiji

However, what we couldn't easily ascertain was what the costs of the whole wedding were versus the actual event itself. Let me explain what I mean. 

Assuming you're going to go down the white wedding route, many of the costs are the same whether you got married at home or away. For example, you'll still need to buy a dress, wedding ring, groom's men suits, engagement ring and wedding stationery. These will carry similar costs whether you got married in Richmond or Rome. 

What I was interested to learn was whether things like venue hire, florists, caterers and photographers costed more in Titchfield than in Tuscany. 

According to Bridal Magazine, the average cost of the actual wedding is £13,290. So this includes food, drink, venue, photographer, videographer, favours and entertainment. You and Your wedding puts this slightly lower at £11,460. 

Me at my brother's wedding in Fiji

However, according to Mintel, the costs reduce to £6,585 for weddings on foreign soils. But, it's difficult to get a like for like comparison for UK compared to abroad. This is because, in the main, couples don't tend to have the same types of weddings abroad as they do at home. And, one of the reasons that people choose to get married abroad is because they can keep it simpler, invite fewer people and keep the extras to a minimum.

Petals at my brother's Fijian wedding

For example, my brother got married in Fiji a few years ago and he specifically wanted something that was the opposite of a traditional wedding. Rather than a church, they got married on the beach at sunset and instead of a strict wedding schedule, the men sipped margaritas on the beach while the women wandered down a flower petaled path at their own pace. It was a lovely, relaxed day and absolutely what they both wanted, with only immediate family invited. 

Looking at the pricing schedules from Kuoni and Thomson, both seem to assume that this is the sort of foreign wedding most people want. Just a few guests and minimal pomp and ceremony. 

For example, the costs quoted to get married in Rome with Kuoni are from £2,794. This just includes the wedding coordinator, interpreter, bouquet, button hole and photographer. No party, no wedding breakfast, no band, no booze and no guests. Likewise, the standard costs from Thomson to get married in Sorrento are from £805. This does include a cake and sparkling wine for groom and bride, but nothing more.

The difficulty we have is that, although we are having fewer guests than we probably would have if we got married at home, we still (hopefully) have at least 40 people coming along and we still want a sit down meal with speeches, a band and lots and lots of wine. 

As we'd hired a wedding planner, we consulted with him about costs and how much we should budget for our wedding. What we soon discovered was that, realistically, if we are going to have many of the elements of a traditional wedding, the costs are going to be pretty much the same as what we would have paid in the UK. 

The only real savings are as follows:
- We are hiring our wedding venue for 5 days which represents far better value for money than just hiring a venue for a day
- Venues in Italy seem much more relaxed around things such as corkage and feeding children. As we are in our own villa, we can probably supplement the wedding drinks with our own and we can feed the children a picnic rather than a sit down meal
- As we plan to have our honeymoon in Italy, we are saving on separate flights and the wedding effectively will become part of the honeymoon. According to You and Your Wedding magazine, the average cost of a honeymoon is £4,073 without spending money. This is far higher an amount than we expect our costs to be  

Over the next few months, I'll be sharing with you how much we spend on our wedding in Italy and the true costs of getting married abroad. If you have any tips or advice, we would love to hear them.

How do you book a wedding in Italy?

Once we'd decided to get married in Italy, the first issue was where to start? How did we know we could book the wonderful wedding of our dreams yet find someone we could trust not to rip us off? How did we know that we wouldn't arrive in Italy to find the wedding of our dreams was really the stuff of nightmares?

We decided to start with the obvious, large tour operators. Since these were well known and mainly protected by ATOL, they seemed the safe, reassuring option. With Kuoni, Thomas Cook or Thomson organising our wedding day, it would be less likely to be ruined by some scam artist running off with our money or us arriving at our wedding venue to discover the ceremony was being held in a hovel in the middle of a building site.

The great thing about these sorts of weddings was that they would do everything for us. We would literally arrive at the hotel and they would organise the flowers, ceremony, food, drinks and legalities.

I had a friend who got married last year and booked a wedding package through Thomas Cook at the Olympic Lagoon Resort in Nissi Bay, Cyprus. She went into the travel agents and said "I want to get married somewhere hot" and they did everything else. The photos looked lovely and she had a wonderful, relaxed day. No bridezilla moments organising the order of service or table plan, she just handed everything over to the experts.

However, with the large tour operators, there wasn't a huge amount of choice. Most companies only held weddings in Lake Garda or Como, the Italian Riviera or the Amalfi Coast. It seemed that getting married in Greece or Cyprus was much more popular. Added to this, most of the ceremonies were held by the sea, around a lake or in a town hall. None of them had ceremonies in a vineyard and none of them were places in which we particularly wanted to get married.

Lake Como. A popular destination for Italian weddings

The next option was to organise everything ourselves. Find a venue, book a celebrant, organise a florist and book the caterers directly. This would have given us a whole load of flexibility, made our day more individual and less of a package and also provided us with a wider selection of towns and cities from which to choose.

The difficulty with this was that it would have taken a lot of time to organise. We simply didn't feel we had the time or money to fly out to Italy to meet with suppliers and, although Adam had basic Italian, we didn't feel confident negotiating with florists and caterers over the phone. We also felt we would have been much more susceptible to being ripped off.

So we decided to find a wedding planning company to do things for us. I guess we were looking for something in between a formulaic wedding organised completely for us and a bespoke wedding we organised ourselves. Something laid back where we had to make some choices, but where we wouldn't necessarily have to sweat the small things.

The sort of wedding we wanted

With a quick google search, we found a whole host of companies who would organise an Italian wedding for us. So the next issue was how did we know which companies were trustworthy? We couldn't meet all of them in person and there didn't seem to be an independent company we could use to judge whether organisers were reputable and whether we could rely on them with our money and wedding day.

We decided to base our choice on the following criteria:
- did their website look professional
- did they have lots of testimonials on their website
- were they willing to let us speak to other couples they had helped
- did they speak English and could we communicate with them via email
- did they have a presence on social media
- did searches on blogs and social media find any negative stories
- did they organise the sorts of weddings we wanted
- ultimately did we like the people we would be dealing with

After contacting a few companies, we chose Italy Weddings. They were really quick to respond to all of our emails and had lots of options and information they could share with us immediately. There were probably other companies we could have opted for, but they seemed right for us.

The main planner was Ben Singleton and he had English as a mother tongue. Their website contained hundreds of photos of exquisite looking weddings, beautiful flowers, wonderful destinations and breathtaking scenic back drops. As well as stacks of case studies of very happy couples.

Our friends Natalie and Phil are getting married in Spain next year and they've chosen a wedding planner to help them too. I think this is a really great option if you're getting married abroad. It's maybe not the cheapest route, but for us, we feel it's the best stress free route and we have someone holding our hands along the way. We hope we've made the right decision and I'll let you know over the next few months!