BY JADE CRASTO All new destinations for that Dream Wedding WEDDING BELLS These days choosing a destination wedding is rapidly becoming a task. Determining the ideal location for your wedding is a difficult challenge. It doesn’t help that the same stereotypical locations for your big day such as Goa or Udaipur come up, given the abundance of alternative possibilities. Numerous uncharted and unusual locations exist that are not only aesthetically pleasing but may hold special meaning to the couple. To gain insight on some of the more unexplored wedding destinations, LuxeBook spoke to luxury wedding planners and stylists. Shreem Events is a luxury wedding and event planning company specialising in destination weddings and artist/ entertainment curation; ESL Weddings is a wedding planning agency with a strong creative twist, dedicated to curate extraordinary experiences that reflect the unique love stories of couples; and To The Aisle is a wedding design company that caters to weddings across the globe, specialising in unique concepts, offbeat locations, and sustainable productions. According to Devanshi Parekh, Founder of Shreem events, “Every client wants to do something new apart from what is existing. They are open to experimenting a little bit unlike earlier. If I tell them Kashmir, they are open to the idea, unlike five years ago, when nobody wanted to plan a wedding there. Now people are ready and open to the idea.” She further mentions how places like Rajasthan and Goa have become costly as the demand for them rise. Founder of ESL Weddings, Ekta Saigal Lulla, has a similar view. Earlier a barrier of inconveniences like transport, good locations and vendors blocked people from planning beautiful wedding destinations, but now that barrier has been broken down with wedding planners making use of the resources Andaman around them. People are willing to explore new places as they want to do something no one has done before. Unique experiences Now that people have their minds set on having a destination wedding, another question arises, how do you choose the right theme for you wedding? Prerika Puri, the founder of To The Aisle, said, “It depends on the destination. If I’m doing a wedding in Manali, we come up with ideas to do a sustainable wedding, maybe like a campfire wedding or have a riverside campfire setting, which we recently did in Manali. It entirely depends on how our clients are and what their destination is”. Ekta from ESL weddings feels people want a more experiencedriven wedding. Instead of just having a normal sit-down dinner or cocktail party at a hotel, people want unique experiences at the destination. People want to explore the destination, rather than just stay bundled up in the hotel. For example, if a wedding is held in Jim Corbett, she would perhaps curate a safari experience. Devanshi from Shreem said that when curating a wedding theme, she likes to make use of the nature around her. If a wedding is being held in Greece, she’s going to limit the number of Indian elements in the wedding and add elements and resources from the destinations. She stated that, if the wedding is in Greece, and a client wants royal Rajasthani elements, then they should have it in Rajasthan itself. “We want to give a local flavour to the guests who are coming in. By local flavour I don’t mean, the food. I mean the décor elements, the nature, you want to give them the cultural activities or dances or performances.”. Egypt, Scotland or Andaman Islands? These are the hottest offbeat wedding destinations of 2023 8|LUXEBOOK|AUGUST 2023 AUGUST 2023 |LUXEBOOK|9
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