Hello, Sarah Rappaport, your luxury reporter in London here. I’m back at my desk in the newsroom after getting married abroad in Greece at Island Resort Athens Riviera. With the Aegean Sea as our backdrop, we said our vows in front of 61 of our closest friends and family, with our first dance to Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” At midnight, chicken gyros were brought out to keep the party going—and it kept going until 4 a.m.  People are likely to throw rose petals at you only once in your life. Photographer: Tonia & Theodore Photography It was even better than I had hoped. Sometimes life can outdo your imagination, and I hadn’t known quite how it’d feel to have people I’ve loved from all parts of my life together in the same space. Why Greece? It’s been a favorite vacation destination of mine for some time, for the sun, sea, hospitality, culture and incredible food. Dan and I had also been there several times on trips together, and we said to each other before we got engaged that we’d love to get married in our favorite vacation spot. Still, throwing a big party in a foreign country has its own challenges, especially in a country where I can’t speak the language and have only visited as a tourist. So as someone who has recently graduated from wedding planning, here are some tips on how to have a destination wedding—or really any wedding—without losing your mind, just in case you or someone you know is considering tying the knot abroad.  This is what the view at Island Resort Athens Riviera looks like. (It’s not AI.) Photographer: Tonia & Theodore Photography Get Local Help I’m extremely organized and love a spreadsheet. Still, I couldn’t have planned a wedding abroad and still managed to have a job, a healthy social life and relationship, and the occasional gym session. You’ll want to have local help too. I hired an Athens-based wedding planner, Rena & Co., and Rena Tzevelekou was invaluable in both making everything run smoothly on the day and bringing my ideas to life. She has relationships with local vendors such as florists and makeup artists, so I didn’t have to spend hours on Google Reviews trying to line people up for my date, and the ones we picked more than delivered. My planner was also full of ideas that referenced the destination. One of them was having an olive bar during cocktail hour with different types of local olives and olive oils for guests to try. At dinner, there were tiny bottles of extra virgin olive oil for guests to take home as gifts.  Little gifts for guests. Photographer: Tonia & Theodore Photography Trust Your Instincts When It Comes to the Budget We wanted to wow our guests with the views at our venue and have a generous buffet of Greek food, so that’s what we invested large parts of the budget on. Also, I have a big sweet tooth (if you’re in London, I put that to work finding the best bakeries a few years ago!) and wanted a showpiece dessert, so we spent a bit more to have a giant pavlova that we decorated in front of our guests in lieu of a more traditional wedding cake. People are still talking to me about my giant pavlova, so that expense was more than worth it. What I think wasn’t worth it was the pair of sky-blue Jimmy Choos that I splurged on. They looked gorgeous in photos, but I struggled to walk and dance in them, and they got swapped for a pair of sandals within an hour. I am one of the many people who stopped wearing heels during the pandemic and never got back into it, so I don’t know why I deluded myself into thinking I’d be a different person on my wedding day. Also, stay off TikTok. Influencer Becca Bloom (aka “the Queen of RichTok”) got married a few weeks before I did, and we have wildly different budgets—I’m a journalist and not the queen of anything. I was wondering if I could get rainbow fireworks like she did for her Lake Como wedding. I didn’t end up paying for any fireworks. The wedding was still great. Accept That Not Everyone Will Make It The trade-off of having a wedding abroad is that people you thought would make it can’t come, whether because of distance, not having enough vacation days, budget concerns or general unwillingness to travel. In some ways, any wedding I had would have been a destination wedding because I’m from Chicago, my husband is from Wales, and we live in London, but skipping the places we’re from and planning a destination wedding somewhere else entirely did mean that not everyone we wanted to attend could end up coming.  Have you ever seen anyone happier about a giant dessert? Photographer: Tonia & Theodore Photography Make Sure Everyone Knows the Rules I travel regularly, but that’s not the case for all of our friends and family. A few months ago, my father-in-law discovered that his passport would expire a few weeks after our wedding in September. I had to work to convince him that he couldn’t travel abroad on it, despite the fact that it was still technically valid. That applies to the actual wedding paperwork too. We found out pretty quickly that it’d be a lot more work to get legally wed in Greece, so we booked a town hall ceremony in London a few days prior. In a small way, it took some of the pressure off, since we were already wed in the eyes of the British government. Too late for cold feet! Roll With the Punches A lot of my vendors wanted payments in cash, which meant transporting thousands of euros through Heathrow Airport. I almost never use cash in my day-to-day London life—I’d say 99% of my transactions are via Apple Pay—so withdrawing large amounts, let alone traveling with it, was nerve-wracking. I also had a last-minute addition of a few guests whose RSVPs didn’t come through, which meant last-minute table shuffling. At the time this felt extremely taxing, but I was glad for the extra guests in the end. Accept that you can’t control everything! I recommended my brother visit Paros (one of our Where to Go 2025 ideas!) after the wedding, and he had a wonderful time. That said, he got stuck on the island for an extra day because of a high-wind sailing ban on the Aegean and missed his flight back to Chicago, despite building an extra day into his schedule. Travel mishaps can happen even to the best of planners. Throw a major life event and party on top of that, and there’s so many plates spinning in the air. But it was all fine! Enjoy the process, and take a minute to enjoy yourself with your new spouse. We had a sweetheart table, and before dinner I stared at my family from Chicago and New York, as well as friends from every part of my life, from my childhood to my 20s and early 30s in London, and I felt so loved. It was all worth it in that moment! | 
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