Hey all! I am going to help you choose the PERFECT location for your elopement. This is going to be the shortened blog post about this topic. I will link the full version as soon as it is complete! So for now, these steps should suit you well to get your search started and find exactly where you want to go.
Talk to your partner
One of the first steps is to talk to your partner and find a common ground. What do you both enjoy? You can pick SO MANY options so here are a few to pick from but I am sure there are many many more to think of:
- Mountains
- Desert
- Ocean/Beach
- Tropical
- Winter
- Abroad
- Home state/location
I would narrow it down to your top 3 for each of you and pick 1 or 2 that you love the most and will agree on! Once you get that figured out, it’s good to have a general idea of what kind of budget you might have for your elopement if you already don’t know this information. The next thing we will do is find a more exact location starting with the coolest tool ever! If you plan on staying local, you can move down to the “finding your location” section.
Let’s start with my favorite tool: Google Flights
In google flights, you can select your departing airport (usually you can get better deals picking the largest airport near you, Denver/NYC/Chicago/Etc), but you can choose whichever airport you want. If you have an exact date in mind already then you can select a specific range of dates. OR if you are unsure or know which month you want you can use google flights “flexible date tool” to find the absolute best deals on flights all year round, just make sure you are in the “explore” tab on the left side. You can choose to find the best deals for the entire year or you can search by the month.
Finding your location
Now you should be at a screen like this where you can search the entire world for flights for certain months from your nearest or best airport. You don’t have to book your flights anytime soon but this should give you an idea of pricing for each area of the world for certain months. Just remember to look at weather patterns before choosing your location. Some parts of the world get more rain the US winter season and are dry in the summer months like southeast Asia.
Look around at a few locations. For example, if you both chose mountain areas then take a look at Switzerland, Utah, Colorado, and other parts of the world/US with mountains. See how much the flights are and take a look around at some venues, places, or Airbnb’s to see if its a place you could see your elopement happening. Trust me, you will feel it when you find the right place.
Once you find “the one” then you want to do a little more research into the area to see what are the best times to visit, best weather during what months, and which months have the best bang for the buck. From there you can search around for flights, venues, places to elope, and places to stay. The search from here is all up to you but this is pretty much it! This trick works for people of all budgets as the google flights tool will help you find the best deals on flights.
Hopefully this helps all!
