Destination wedding invitation wording

A destination invitation is a different document from a local one. You are not asking somebody to drive an hour on a Saturday, you are asking for flights, hotel nights and annual leave. Some of your guests will have to say no, and the wording should make that easy rather than awkward.

Which means it has to do two jobs at once: be beautiful, and be genuinely useful.

Send it absurdly early#

Twelve months for the save the date, eight to nine months for the invitation. That is not caution, it is the point at which flights are affordable and leave can still be booked. Anything later and you are choosing the guest list for people.

The general timings are in when to send your invitations, and a destination day is the one case where the earliest end of every range applies.

The invitation itself#

The romance goes in the opening line. The logistics go underneath it, clearly marked, so a guest can read the first part with their partner and the second part with a calendar.

Sarah and Thomas are getting married on the coast of Puglia, and there is nobody they would rather have there than you.

Then, plainly:

• The nearest airport, named, with rough flight times from where most guests live
• The dates the celebration actually spans, not just the ceremony day
• What is provided and what is not: a shuttle, a welcome dinner, the first night
• Roughly what a guest should expect to spend

That last one feels uncomfortable to write and it is the most useful sentence on the whole invitation. A guest who cannot afford it will decline either way. The kindness is letting them do that early and privately instead of after they have looked up flights three times.

Give permission to decline#

The single line that separates a good destination invitation from an awkward one.

We know this is a big ask, and we will not be offended in the slightest if it is not possible. We would rather see you when we are home.

Write it. It is true, it costs you nothing, and it removes the exact guilt that makes people leave a reply unanswered for six weeks. It also tends to improve your reply rate, which is the opposite of what couples expect.

The reply deadline is earlier than you think#

Work backwards from when you have to give final numbers to the venue, then take another month off it, because a guest booking international travel needs a decision point of their own before yours.

Set the date, put it in writing, and plan to chase. Everything in the guests who never reply applies twice over here, because a destination decision is genuinely harder to make and people put it off.

Two tiers of information#

Destination days generate a lot of detail: the villa, the shuttle times, the taxi from the airport, what the weather does in September, whether the ceremony is on grass. Not all of that belongs on the invitation.

Put the decision making information on the invitation and the arrival information somewhere it can be updated, since some of it will change. Where the line sits between the two is covered in what goes where.

The dress code needs more than two words#

Heat, grass, sand, a church that requires shoulders covered, a marquee that gets cold at eleven. All of that is worth a sentence, and guests packing a suitcase for a foreign country will thank you for every word of it.

Cocktail, but linen. The ceremony is outdoors at four and it will be thirty degrees.

Dress code wording covers the codes themselves, and a destination day is the clearest case for adding the honest sentence underneath.

One link, not an envelope of paper#

Half of your guests will read this on a phone in another country, some of them at an airport. A link they can reopen, that has the address in it and the times in it and does not have to be found in a drawer, is simply the better format for this kind of day.

If you are weighing the two, the complete guide to digital invitations lays out where each one wins.