Booking Venue for your destination wedding

With every passing year, Indian weddings are going BIG, FAT, GRAND & GLOBAL. If you are looking for a Royal Palace, Fort, Castle or Dessert wedding; then your search stops at Rajasthan: The Land of Kings, colors & palaces.

For a common person, the Royal Indian wedding is an enticing dream world. Every girl’s heart nurtures the dream of marrying off amidst pomp and flamboyance. The ostentation and hype that an exotic designer wedding enjoys does not come without a cost. Yes, grand Indian weddings come at the cost of your fortune.

Just a few weeks back, I was planning a wedding in Jaipur (the pink city) for the month of July. Summer weddings are not a common sight in Rajasthan and I tried explaining to both the groom & the bride’s family about the challenges they have to be prepared for. All said and done, they did not want to change the dates and we were planning a Royal Hindu wedding in the Pink city in Peak of OFF-SEASON! I was glad, for once planning would not be tough; owing to off-season, we would have wide choices to present to the client.

One of the foremost things in destination weddings is to freeze the venue for the functions and the rooms for stay. This was not a very big gathering; we needed to plan for 500 guests. Jaipur being a prime tourist destination has many options. But to my surprise, everything across Jaipur was full- even for July. Jaipur supposedly is full this year; mostly booked till January'09. After 7 days of research and hunting, we finally zeroed in on splitting the guests in 4 different heritage hotels for stay and for the 3 big functions zeroed in on Fort & a palace venues. Although its going to cost a fortune but we were lucky to get hands on these great locales.

So my suggestion to all you great people contemplating a Royal wedding in India is to plan and book all your venues at least 6 months in advance. Not only will that enable you to have more options to choose from but it will also be a much cheaper option than in case of last minute bookings.