Wedding itinerary template
A destination wedding is two documents pretending to be one: the weekend the guests experience, and the travel operation that delivers ninety people to a field in another country on the same afternoon.
Agencies get asked for the first and are judged on the second.
The guest-facing timeline
- Each event with a time, a place, and what to wear. Dress code is the single most asked question and the one most often left out.
- How to get between venues, including for the guests without a car.
- What is provided and what is not — transport, drinks, whether dinner is included on the Friday.
- Who to ask. Not the couple. Give guests a name that is not the bride's.
The travel operation behind it
- Arrivals spread across two or three days, by different routes. Nobody arrives together.
- Rooming across several hotels at different price points, which is the part that generates the most correspondence.
- Transfers timed to flights that will move.
- Every guest holds their own booking reference, because they booked separately. There is no shared locator for a wedding party, and an itinerary that assumes one is wrong for almost everybody.
The ninety-messages problem
A wedding is the clearest case for why a static itinerary fails. When the Saturday transfer moves by an hour, somebody has to tell ninety people. On a group chat half of them will not see it; individually it is an evening's work; and the couple should be doing neither the week of their wedding.
This is the shape of problem Viaquo exists for: change the segment once, and every guest gets the update on their own phone in their own language, from the agency rather than from the couple. Guests who ask a follow-up get an answer from the itinerary rather than from the bride.
Related: Groups, leaders and rooming · Sending an advisory to a whole trip