To send or not to send? and Destination Etiquette

angieg00

Hi everyone, I'm new here!

I'm planning a wedding in Punnta Cana for April 2011...very excited!!!
Just a question to those of you planning or have already planned...did you send out invitations or did you just have a little chat with your guests? There will only be around 20-25 people coming, very small and I see all those people regularly so I can talk to them...what did you guys do?

Also any etiquette issues you ran into?  What did you do?

Any other advice you can give would be great!!!
Thanks!

angybanez

Hello and welcome! We sent our Save the Dates two weeks ago for our November 13th wedding in PuntaaCana and along with them we printed out inserts for booking/flight information and accommodation info. We'll be sending formal invitations so that we know what our guests will want to eat for the reception and have them RSVP for that as well as our at home reception, which we will also include in the formal invitation. As Jaimie said, a destination wedding is already different from the norm, so if you break rules, and if you have to break them, then it's OK since this is your wedding :-)

angieg00

Lovely! Thanks everyone! And yes, SimplyMistaken you seem very prepared! haha Good info, I think I'll look into that website stuff.
And yes, the things people will say although they mean well...I've already had two people say..."punnta cana? but you can get sick there, it's like mexico and cuba!" ughhh! haha Well my fiance and I have never been there and would love to go! We're planning on going to Iberostar Bavaro...anybody been or planning for there?

LolaPizzy

Hello and welcome! No advice as far as Punnta Cana but I'm also planning on sending save the dates, doing a website, and then sending invitations. But, FI and I have already told mostly everyone we really want to be there roughly when and where it will take place so they can start preparing.

Good luck planning!

P.S. Why is TK making me change the word from Punnta with one N????

angieg00

haha I wonder the same thing...Puuuuunta Cana!

carrieoz_76

Definitely have a chat when you have a date and a location - just so your inner circle of immediate family and best friends who will want to come can start saving and holding dates for vacations.

Then you can do STDs anywhere from 6-12 months beforehand.  They aren't required, and you can just email folks instead.  You can send STDs to everyone you're going to invite, or narrow it and send it to only that inner circle.  Just be careful not to send a STD to one person but not his/her best friend b/c you know they'll talk.  One reason we had a shorter STD list than invite list is b/c we didn't know that far in advance how many ppl our budget would allow us to invite.  You can't make the list shorter after you send STDs b/c you definitely need to invite everyone you sent a STD to, but you CAN make it longer if you want by inviting more ppl than you sent the STD to.

Then you can do invites a few months before the wedding to your guest list.  Local weddings do invites around 2 mos. before, but we'll do ours 3 mos. b/c ours is so far away.

We also have a wedding website w/ travel and accommodations info, plus I email everyone who's invited who has said they're coming w/ travel and accommodations info periodically (not too often - maybe once a month).

With all that, folks will STILL want to talk to you on the phone or in person about it, and that's fine - they're excited, it's a good thing!

ETA: Etiquette-wise, I just try to treat them how I'd want to be treated if I was spending thousands to go to someone else's wedding really far away.  If you're guided by that, I think you'll be fine.

nubiannqween

 We didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feeling by not inviting them so we ended up inviting everyone that we would have invited to a wedding at home.  We already knew only a select few would come, which is what we ultimately wanted.   I sent out save the date postcards about 9 months prior. We are mailing formal invitations at the end of this month. I also did a wedding website which contains all of the important wedding info. travel info and TA contact info.