Southwest Airlines' brand-new partnership with Icelandair is officially live and available for booking — but be warned, it'll be a bit limited for the time being.
30.01.2025 - 20:05 / cntraveler.com
Alyssa Bonanno and Will Mayer were never going to have a traditional destination wedding. The couple—who met in Chicago, reconnected in Los Angeles, and now live in New York City—are the founders of branding agency and production company Better Half, and thus are well-versed in creating ambitious visuals for big-name companies like Nike and Spotify. When they got engaged in November 2022, they had some unique goals for their nuptials: namely, to generate a bit of “friction” for their guests.
Alyssa and Will wed in Iceland last September.
The pair specialize in visual production.
“I wanted to make everybody go somewhere they hadn't been before, pull them out of their comfort zone, and then give them something incredibly memorable,” says Will, whose background is in cinematography. Choosing Iceland for their destination celebration was an easy decision. “It's one of our favorite places in the world, and people always are surprised by it,” says Alyssa. “We wanted to show them all it has to offer.” Planning their event like a video shoot, the pair designed an unforgettable trip for their 80 guests in September 2024 that spanned the island nation, from a welcome dinner in Reykjavík to rest stops around waterfalls to a wedding day with a tattoo artist and midnight hot dogs. Here’s how they pulled off an anti-wedding of sorts in the Land of Fire and Ice.
Will and Alyssa planned a tight schedule of activities for their guests, over four days.
En route to Highland Base Hotel the group hiked the Gjáin, Háifoss, and Hjálparfos waterfalls.
This advice might be reckless for any people who don’t specialize in visual production, but the couple opted not to hire anyone who’d worked on a wedding before (with minor exceptions for the officiant and cake baker). “Our one rule for the wedding was we didn’t want it to be a wedding,” Will says. They brought on Kristín Larsdóttir Dahl, an Icelandic film producer who splits her time between Berlin and Reykjavík, and entrusted with hiring her own production partners and personal friends, as with the art direction from Studio Procrastinate and Mirra Elísabet Valdísardóttir, who led a yoga class for guests the morning of the wedding.
In the process of bringing on vendors via Kristín, the couple had created a 20-page treatment describing the event’s desired visual style via mood boards and references, which included recent Jacquemus fashion shows that integrated elements of nature, and James Bond films from the 1960s. “We had exactly the core components we wanted for a tablescape. We had how we wanted people to feel,” says Alyssa. Key hires also included the fashion photographers Louis Browne and Olav Stubberud.
The couple's events took place largely indoors because of the harsh
Southwest Airlines' brand-new partnership with Icelandair is officially live and available for booking — but be warned, it'll be a bit limited for the time being.
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