Most couples experience a couple of glitches in their wedding planning, and distance usually doesn't have anything to do with it; it's just the nature of trying to work with several different vendors at once. If you were planning a wedding next door to where you currently live, you could reasonably expect a problem or two to crop up over the course of your engagement. They might not be major issues, but things that need to be dealt with as soon as possible to make sure that the wedding goes along as planned.

That phrase “as soon as possible” is where the distance thing can bite you. If you have a problem with your florist, for example, and both of you are in the same town, you can deal with it fairly easily, even in the worst-case scenario. Long distance can be a whole different story.

Let's say you're planning a wedding in your hometown and a friend has told you that your florist has closed shop and left town. You find that difficult to believe, of course, because … well, because your wedding is coming up, and your florist wouldn't forget about that! You call her right away, just so you can dismiss this silly rumor. No answer. You call later. Still no answer. After you try eight times without even getting a recording, you drive over to the shop on your lunch break and find that your friend was right: Your florist has disappeared.

This is a worst-of-the-worst-case situation, of course. Most brides don't end up dealing with crooked vendors (especially not if they've done their research). However, it can be easier to clear up unforeseen circumstances if you're a short drive down the pike instead of a hundred miles away.

Is this some roundabout way of telling you you're crazy to plan a destination wedding outside of the relative built-in safety of a resort? No. You just have to be willing to keep on top of things from week to week — or hire a local wedding consultant.