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Where will all our guests stay if we get married in the Douro Valley? Featured
We deal mainly with <a href="https://douroweddings.com">destination weddings in the Douro</a>, 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. [caption id="attachment_743" align="alignnone" width="1024"]<img class="wp-image-743 size-large" src="https://douroweddings.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/vintage_house_douro_wedding-1024x683.jpg" alt="vintage house douro wedding" width="1024" height="683" /> Vintage House Wedding Venue[/caption] 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!
Wedding planner job Featured
We are currently looking for a wedding planner to join our team. You do not need to have experience in wedding planning, but you should have some experience with running events at some level. You do not need any specific qualifications, other than a degree. 95% of our clients are from overseas, so you should speak a very high level of English, but you must also be fluent in Portuguese. Having a passion for northern Portugal and Portuguese culture is very important, but equally relevant is that you are extremely well-organised and detail oriented. Your work would include direct client contact, negotiating with vendors, finding creative ideas for clients and working at the weddings themselves; you must be prepared to work very flexible hours and you would have to work some weekends when we have weddings on. There will also be opportunities to work with our corporate events team at Porto Events. You would work both from our office in central Porto and from home - you will be working alongside experience wedding planners, but will have to take on increasing amounts of responsibility as you grow into the job. Please note that we are only interested in taking on someone who has every intention to stay with our company over the long term. We get a lot of covering letters that are clearly written using AI and it is invariably very obvious and even worse, bland - please write something authentic about yourself and show what makes you different from the other candidates applying. Please send in your CV and covering letter to charlie@douroweddings.com.
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