What Affects Your Wedding Budget?
These five factors shape most destination wedding quotes. Compare Jaipur and Udaipur packages, or browse vendor categories to refine your plan.
Location and Venue
The location and the venue in that location are probably two of the most prominent factors that will affect the cost of your destination wedding.
- Make sure your location is easily accessible by various means of transportation, such as by road, railway, or air. This helps your guests to arrive at the wedding venue conveniently with a low transportation budget.
- Try to pick a location that is naturally pretty and aesthetic, so you do not spend much of your wedding budget enhancing the facade of the area and property you have picked for your destination wedding.
Season and Time
Indian weddings mainly occur during the saaya season, a time considered auspicious for hosting wedding ceremonies by the spiritual and religious calendars.
If it is during the peak Saaya season, then you might have to keep a higher wedding budget in mind, while a non-Saaya season or day wedding can often cost less and thus require a lower destination wedding cost.
Travel and Stay
Destination weddings always require travel and accommodation. During the residential wedding planning process, the only expenses are the venue's rent, F&B, and accommodation for the handful of guests coming from various cities to your wedding. Travel and accommodation costs are mandatory when it is a destination wedding.
- It would be best to consider the destination wedding costs depending on the location's distance from you and your guests' residence.
- Regarding the stay part, you will have various options, like staying in different venues or staying at the same venue as your main WEDDING VENUE. This will impact the cost of your destination wedding.
Length of Guest List
The number of guests you invite almost always affects the total wedding cost, whether a destination or a residential wedding.
- The number of people on your guest list will determine the per-head cost and, therefore, the overall price you will have to spend on food and beverages (F&B), accommodation expenses, travel costs, etc.
Wedding Vendors
The amount you pay each wedding vendor also impacts the destination wedding cost.
- We suggest you prefer local vendors from the place of your choice to cut on their transportation cost.
Once you have considered the above aspects, your destination wedding costs will be more precise, and you can plan a more organized wedding budget that will not take you by surprise or burn an unexpected hole in your pocket.
Estimated Cost Break-up for a Destination Wedding
A practical percentage split to keep venue, catering, and vendor spends balanced across your total budget.
We recommend allocating 45–50% of your wedding budget to venues and catering for all functions.
Purchasing wedding jewellery for the bride and groom is the next most significant investment. We suggest keeping this budget separate from the wedding planning budget or allocating a minimum of 15–18% of your budget to this cost.
Approximately 4–6% is suggested for honeymoon planning.
The ideal split for budget destination weddings should be around 5–7%, but some couples might also choose to go all out and spend 10–15% on thematic decor.
We suggest allocating 10–13% for pre-wedding or engagement shoots, wedding photography, wedding videography, and albums, owing to the importance of investing in professional services to capture timeless memories.
We suggest keeping this budget separate from the planning costs. On average, this should be around 5% for all events.
We suggest allocating around 5–10% for entertainment.
Brides should limit this budget to 3–5% to make room for other investments, such as invitations, wedding favours, transportation, ceremonial spending, priests', family, and in-laws' gifts, etc.
Plan smarter with Cosmical Events tools
Use our budget planning tool for a personalised cost breakdown, our checklist to map every event on your timeline, and our vendor directory to compare local professionals in your wedding city.
