We deal mainly with destination weddings in the Douro, which means pretty much all the guests attending will need somewhere to sleep. Often, we hear from our clients that the ideal scenario will be that the guests all stay at the same location as the wedding, which of course makes things a lot simpler for everyone, but that is not always possible! Let us take you through your options.

Here we are going to look at the issue of accommodation for wedding venues up the valley, away from Porto – we do plan weddings in and around Porto and elsewhere in northern Portugal, but we will not look at these options in this post.

The key issue is that many of the iconic vineyard (“Quinta”) locations in the Douro are historic buildings, repurposed for events, but not as hotels, which means that whilst they may have a handful of rooms available, they will rarely have enough for all the guests at a wedding. The exceptions to this are the few purpose-built hotels which also host weddings (such as Vintage House and Six Senses), but the Douro Valley does not have many options if you are looking for a venue that reflects the culture and atmosphere of the region which also has a decent number of rooms.

Vintage House Wedding Venue

This means that typically we organise a hybrid option for accommodation, where there will be a room for the bride and groom and a few other guests available at the wedding location and for the other guests we will organise a few coaches (sometimes setting off at different times of the night) to ferry the guests to the rooms.

There is nearly always a hotel relatively nearby with reasonably priced rooms as the Douro Valley is well supplied in this sense and we have a lot of experience in handling this issue, so we can pretty much always find a way to make it work well.

If you do want to have a wedding in a venue which also has accommodation, then generally you will be required to book up all of the rooms, which can be a good option, but can add extra expense to the wedding. The Six Senses costs €180,000 to book up for a wedding weekend for example! We have found that the hybrid option of finding a fabulous venue and an attractive nearby hotel for accommodation can be a perfect compromise.

Often, we will organise a pre or post wedding event (like a barbecue or brunch) either at the accommodation hotel or somewhere nearby and having all the guests in one place can make this a lot easier to organise. Generally, we will also supply all your guests with a booking code to give them a negotiated room rate at the hotel where they will be staying and we also sometime organise transport from the airport to the hotel to make things as simple as possible for guests.

So, if you are worried about where all your guests are going to stay, rest assured that we have a solution for almost every situation – this will all form an important part of your choice of venue and our unrivalled knowledge of the region will make sure that you get the very best solution!