Our Destination Wedding in Mexico - Long Review
# Intro
My wife and I had our destination wedding at Iberostar Selection Paraíso Maya Suites in November 2024, and I am writing this review to share my experience and hopefully help anybody preparing. It could be a long and stressful process, but it's definitely worth it. Also shout out to the author of [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/weddingplanning/comments/yrxi3f/my_honest_review_of_our_destination_wedding_long/) which really helped me a lot.
# Why We Chose a Destination Wedding
We didn't have a lot of guests (30 ppl in total) and we really wanted our guests to have the chance to have fun together for a relatively long time instead of the typical "driving or flying to a place, having dinner then going home" kind of format. We live in Ontario, Canada, and we have guests from all over Canada (Vancouver, Winnipeg, Prince Edward Island). It's really nice for us to hang out with them in the resort for a couple of days.
It's also cost-efficient since wedding venues, food, vendors or services could be pricey in the Toronto area.
# Resort & Location
The resort we had our wedding at is Iberostar Selection Paraíso Maya Suites (I'll just call it "Maya") in Riviera Maya, Q.R., Mexico. For those of you who aren't familiar with that area, it's a very popular vacation destination south of Cancun.
We actually wanted to have our wedding at another resort simply because we had a vacation there a year back. However, that resort has a stict adult-only policy and we had guests under 18 yo, so we had to shift to Maya which is in the same complex. It actually saved everybody a good couple hundred bucks because the adult-only resort in on the pricier side.
The resort is family friendly with a handful of pools, bars and restaurants. Oh, did I forget to mention "all-inclusive"? My wife and I are big fans of all-inclusive vacations with buffets and open bars, and I believe our guests enjoyed it a lot in the resort.
# The Planning Process
We started our planning by searching "(hotel name) + wedding package", and got some info sheets from wedding planning agents which might be inconsistent and out-of-date but still gave us a high-level understanding of how everything works and a ballpark of the cost. We reached out to the wedding sales department (or whatever they call it) and eventually got all the up-to-date information regarding venues, cost and everything we needed to know.
We did use a "wedding planner" who is actually more of a travel agent. She was able to find the travel packages (flight + stay) for most of our guests with better price than booking directly from airlines or other agencies (e.g. Expedia) and send out individual links for booking.
In terms of timeline, we actually had a very short one (see below). Looking back at my email history, I'm still feeling nervous and stressful, but very proud of ourselves making it happen.
* June: started reaching out to resort and travel agents * July: confirmed time and location, and made our travel reservation * Aug: sent invitation and travel quotes to guests. We also got our wedding coordination assigned to us and started working with her. * Oct: nailed down almost all the details. * Nov 2nd: it's THE DAY!
I'll keep working on this post (a little tired today) with this structure suggested by ChatGPT, but feel free to ask me anything!