10 essential honeymoon tips
21.07.2023 - 08:01
/ roughguides.com
As if planning a wedding wasn’t stressful enough, you’ve now got to organise an unforgettable honeymoon. Beyond deciding where to go, there are a whole host of practicalities to tackle before you tie the knot and take off. Here, Rough Guides' in-house honeymoon expert Emma Gibbs shares ten honeymoon tips to help the first trip of your happily married life go smoothly.
Start off by deciding how much you can afford to spend. Then stick to it. It’s easy to get carried away with honeymoon planning, so knowing how much you can comfortably afford is important from the beginning – and don’t forget to leave a little room in the budget for activities (be it scuba diving, a couples’ massage or fancy dinners) while you’re away.
If you’re desperate for a particular honeymoon but your budget just won’t stretch to it, consider a honeymoon gift list. Countless travel agents now offer this service, but one of the best on the market remains to Buy Our Honeymoon, where you can create your own honeymoon list and fill it with whatever you like – ballooning over the Serengeti; champagne in a hot tub; upgrades to first class – which your guests can then “buy” or contribute towards as gifts.
Palm trees on San Andres beach, Colombia — shutterstock
Holiday brochures will sell you a certain kind of fly-and-flop honeymoon, often with no real discernible difference in offerings from one company to another. If you’re after something a little more unique, a little more you, it’s worth using the brochures as a stepping stone – alongside guidebooks and the internet – to figure out what you want and where you want to go but remember: they’re not an indication of the only options available to honeymooners.
Tell everyone it’s your honeymoon. Write it on every enquiry form you fill in and every booking you make; tell travel agents, check-in staff and air hostesses; in short, don’t wait to be asked – tell people. You may think that the word honeymoon immediately makes people see dollar signs attached to your heads, but in truth, telling people that it’s your honeymoon will often open doors that wouldn’t normally be opened – from free hotel upgrades and champagne on arrival to candlelit dinners and petal-strewn baths, being newlywed is not something to keep to yourselves.
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A honeymoon is a post-wedding holiday. It’s a great excuse to be a little more extravagant than you might be normally, sure. But there’s no rule about how you honeymoon – if you want to go to Glastonbury with your new spouse and all your mates, why not? Likewise, if you’ve always dreamt about trekking through the Alps, backpacking across Asia for six months, or heading to an all-inclusive fantasy island, this is likely to be the perfect chance.
Before you book