Sean and I live in California but we are not from here originally. My family are far away in Ireland. Sean's family currently live in Tennessee. We met in New York and have lots of friends who still live there. There are a lot of places there to choose from when deciding where to get married. Because we'll be asking many people to travel to celebrate with us, we figured why not hold the party somewhere that everyone would be on vacation. And I love the idea of getting married on a beach. That's why the Caribbean seemed a great location. It's in the middle between the west coast of America, the east coast of America and Europe.
But that's just the beginning. As it turns out there are lots of islands in the Caribbean and I started my research without really having a favorite. I began by contacting a travel agent who specializes in organizing travel to the Caribbean. She writes a Caribbean wedding blog so it seemed a good place to start. Following an exchange of email, she sent me the names of a few resorts and the wedding websites of a few former clients. She explained that she would be happy to negotiate a good rate with a hotel and to arrange the travel plans for all the guests, provided everyone worked through her to arrange their trip.
When Sean and I checked out the hotels she recommended, a couple on Antigua, one on the British Virgin Islands and a few on Aruba we started to get a feel for the type of location we liked. I found the blog of an amazing wedding photographer on Antigua, Vanessa Hall, and this post with photos of Antigua itself just absolutely captured my imagination. It's amazing how a beautiful photograph can transport you to a place. Looking at these photos, I let out a deep sigh, closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face and my whole body relax. Perfect.
We got back to our travel agent and asked for more information about the resorts in Antigua and when she replied, I realized that she simply emailed the hotel asking for information and then forwarded their email to me. Wait a minute? I can do that myself. I don't need an intermediary. In addition to that when reviewing the references she sent us, I realized that the 'great rates' she negotiated with the resorts were way out of our budget. Her clients were asking their guests to pay $200/person/night. Yikes! My job often involves conducting lots of communications with many different groups on a similar topic, so I'm used to keeping track and managing different threads. I figured I could handle this so I decided to dispense with the travel agent.
But Vanessa Hall had really captured my heart with her photos so I was stuck on Antigua. I used the Antigua Tourist Information site to find other resorts there and Sean and I spent a few nights looking through the websites of hotels until they all started to look alike. In the next week I emailed all the resorts we liked and bought the travel book about Antigua. Soon enough I began to think that Antigua wasn't for us. The places we liked were all way out of our budget and I wasn't ready yet to compromise on our criteria and go with a place within our budget. It was time to expand the search again beyond Antigua. Sorry Vanessa.
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