When you elope, there are almost no vendors to speak of. You might pick up a corsage or a bouquet at a flower shop, but you don't spend months comparing and contrasting floral styles with a florist. Certainly, for an elopement, you'd dress your best, but you probably wouldn't drop thousands of dollars on a custom-fitted gown. And while you and your groom might dance the night away in a nightclub or a romantic restaurant if you eloped, you wouldn't be paying the musicians by the hour.

When you plan a destination wedding — even if you choose a resort that takes most of the work out of the planning for you — you will have to make decisions about:

• Flowers

• Music

• Pictures

• Ceremony readings and vows

• Reception food and drink

• Music for the ceremony and reception

• Wedding cake

• The wedding dress

Many — though not all — of these elements are usually eliminated during an elopement. You can see just by looking at the list that destination weddings have an element of work attached to them, whereas an elopement can be a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of thing.

There are two ways to plan a destination wedding: You can choose a resort where most of the wedding services are already in place, or a place that may not specialize in destination weddings, but certainly has some wedding vendors nearby, ready and willing to help you plan your event. (Wedding vendors aren't hard to find, once you know where to look. Chapter 9 walks you through the process.)

Planning a destination wedding takes more effort than planning an elopement. You'll need more time, more money, and more ideas. Elopements are very short-lived events; destination weddings usually have their guests coming together a week or so before the wedding. That means you'd better have some fun things planned for your grandma and your future in-laws to do!

Choosing to hold your wedding at a resort that specializes in destination events is unarguably easier than trying to put a wedding together piece-by-piece. When all of the vendors have already been corralled by someone else, all of the activities have been arranged, and all of the resort's services have been put together in a nice, neat, easy-to-manage pamphlet, you can check off the things you want and be done with it. This is a major, major perk of a destination wedding: Aside from your having to come up with a way to pay for the affair, it's largely stress-free.

Planning a destination wedding without the benefit of a resort to guide you through it is a little more difficult, but not exactly impossible. In fact, it's done every day — and it's being done with more and more regularity as destination weddings become more common. This is great news for brides everywhere, because as more and more wedding vendors in Middle America become accustomed to working with out-of-town couples, their processes for doing so become more streamlined, and the chances of major mixups drop considerably.