One misconception is that destination weddings are small events. While that certainly may hold true for some couples, other brides and grooms invite all of the people they would have invited to an in-town wedding. Why not, they ask? If people have to travel to the wedding anyway, and the bride and groom have to pay for the food and drink no matter where the wedding takes place, why would they cut people from the list?

Decisions, Decisions

There are no rules on the size of a destination wedding, only limits on what may be possible at any given location. So if you decide that you do want 150 guests to join you for a week in Florida, all you have to do is work out the logistics (which is obviously easier said than done). But if you only want to include immediate family members, planning a destination wedding is the perfect way to keep the wedding small and yet incredibly special — probably more so than planning a tiny event back home.

Zip It Till You Know Your Numbers

Before you start telling everyone that you're having a great tropical wedding and you hope they have some vacation time coming up so they can join the fun, you have to know what kind of destination wedding you can comfortably afford. Although you are not responsible for paying your guests' travel and lodging expenses, you will pay for the reception — and some locations are much pricier than others. Also, some can only accommodate a small number of guests. Do your homework before verbally implying to anyone that they're going to make the cut.

If you find a place (such as a cruise ship or a large resort) that can handle every family member and friend that you and your fiancé can think of, there's no reason to keep them off the list, assuming that you want a large wedding.

Don't Invite Everyone

The etiquette surrounding invitations to destination weddings doesn't vary all that much from in-town weddings, with one exception: Don't invite mere acquaintances who wouldn't need to travel to your wedding if you were having it in town. If you live in Topeka and you're getting married in Paris, for example, chances are that coworkers you know only casually are not going to make the trip overseas, and may interpret the invitation to join you atop the Eiffel Tower as nothing more than an attempt to squeeze gifts out of them.

Not inviting those people may put you in a spot, especially if you would have invited them to an in-town reception. Don't lose sleep. First of all, people are fairly understanding about destination weddings — the general assumption (true or not) is that only close friends and family members will be invited. And most couples can safely assume that the majority of those who accept the invitations will be close friends and family.

There's always a chance that if you invite your whole office, several of them will show. However, it's just as easy — and acceptable — for you to not invite any of them. They are much less likely to be offended at not being included in a destination wedding than at not being invited to a reception down the street. And anyway, you have a perfect excuse for leaving them off the list: Your entire office can't be on vacation at one time, now can they?