Hopefully you will only ever be planning one destination wedding, so as this will be your first time, we appreciate it can be an overwhelming experience! So here we will give you a few pointers on how to get the very best from our services as your destination wedding planner in the Douro & northern Portugal.

Before you contact us

Whilst we are very familiar with a large number of venues and vendors, this can be a weakness as well as a strength, because there can be a bewildering amount of choice. Our best advice is to consider what your ideal wedding would look like (and not focus on the Douro Valley or northern Portugal). Just start googling and find some weddings and venues anywhere in the world that you like the look of, then share them with us. With this information we can look at all the venues and vendor options we know so well and find the best options in our part of the world. In other words, focus initially on the vibe of the wedding rather than googling what you are looking for in our part of the world.

Budget

One of the first questions we ask is how much you would like to spend and on this you need to be frank and not view this as a negotiation. This process is not like buying a used car, where you might put in a low-ball bid, knowing that there will be some back and forth before you settle on a higher number (!). If you decide to use us as your wedding planner, then we are on your side and we will be trying to get the best deal possible for you – the prices that venues and vendors charge are generally quite fixed, so negotiation is not a big part of wedding planning. What we can bring to you through are many years of experience in our area is knowing where the best value for money is. Once we know your accurate budget, we can make it stretch to give you the best possible experience for the money you want to spend.

Choice of vendors

This can be a difficult issue, because many of our clients will have specific ideas about who they want as a photographer, decorator, caterer or whatever, which might be based on online reviews, recommendations, personal meetings and so on. These are of course all valid, but you should always remember that we have worked with most of these vendors at some stage and above all we know who we can trust to be both reliable, honest and high quality. As wedding planners we always want to work with vendors who we know will not let us or the client down – there are a lot of vendors who may appear to be a compelling choice, but may be flakey in all sorts of ways you would only discover too late! As wedding planners, we do not recommend particular vendors because we have some beneficial financial relationship with them (!), we recommend vendors who we have worked with time and time again and we know the quality of their work. Our hearts always sink when a client asks us to work with vendors not on our list of favourites, because it feels like a massive risk.

Put yourselves in our hands

This sounds like a big statement, but if you are going to have a destination wedding, then you are by definition going to be planning a wedding in a country that you are not familiar with and things are likely to work very differently from back home here in northern Portugal! Our advice then is that once you have decided on your destination wedding planner (which hopefully will be us, but you can’t win them all), then you have to put your faith in us. Just like if you were fighting a case in court, you have to trust your lawyer, because you will be in a world you don’t understand, you have to trust your destination wedding planner to give you the very best advice. We know the world of weddings in our corner of the world so well and you have to remember that we will only ever work in your best interests, so you will get so much more out of us if you are prepared to trust our advice 100%!

What next?

I suppose the overriding point here is that your destination wedding will be a leap into the unknown, but once you have made your decision to choose us as your wedding planner, then consider us as your partner, who will only ever be on your side, rather than just another supplier that you will have to coax and negotiate with. The first online meeting with us is completely free and if you come out of that meeting feeling that we know our stuff and that we have integrity, then you can know from that moment on we will only ever have your best interests at heart!