What else makes a destination wedding different from an elopement? Well, how about the fact that when you plan a wedding, you also get to include your friends and relatives as attendants? Surrounding yourself with the people closest to you can go a long way toward making your wedding a truly memorable experience. It also tightens the bonds that already exist between you and your friends, and strengthens budding relationships, like those with your future sister(s)-in-law.

Lightening the Burden

If you've ever served as a bridesmaid for a rotten (translation: highly demanding) bride, you may be thinking twice about having any bridesmaids in your wedding. You wouldn't want anyone to go through the same horrible experience, after all.

However, you have the ability to make this a pleasant experience for your bridesmaids simply by treating them well. They should be willing to help you in any way during the course of the wedding planning, but you shouldn't hit them with bizarre requests (“Change your hair color so that it matches mine!” or “Lose ten pounds so you'll look nice in my wedding pictures!”).

Bottom line: Treat the bridesmaids well, and they'll treat you well in return. Just make sure that they know up front what you expect of them, and don't be shy about spelling out the seemingly little things (for instance, that you expect them to arrive at the destination on the same day you do, and that you expect them not to be blind drunk at the reception). You must also make sure that bridesmaids understand that they will incur wedding-related expenses. You'll read about this in more detail in Chapter 7.

Feel the Love

Including other members of your family in the wedding is also a huge difference between a destination wedding and an elopement. If you planned on eloping, for example, you couldn't ask your mother to do a reading at the ceremony, nor would she be able to shop for the perfect dress. Most important, she would miss out on watching her baby walk down the aisle, and although it may not seem like that should be a devastating blow to her (or other members of the family), it very well could be.

Having your family around you on your wedding day — even if they're the only people at the ceremony — usually turns out to be the one thing brides appreciate most about their wedding experience, whether it's a destination wedding or a traditional, in-town affair. Until the actual day of the wedding arrives, you may not realize how much it means to you to have your parents looking on as you recite your vows. Your wedding could be the beginning of a great new phase of your relationship with your whole family, which it should be (and which elopements often are not).