The Micro, Intimate & Destination Wedding Handbook: Small Weddings, Big Business

A dinner for twenty on a stone terrace. Vows on a ridge at sunrise. Forty guests stepping off a boat for a three-day celebration. Small weddings and faraway weddings are no longer the side door of the industry. For a lot of planners, they're the front door.

And yet most wedding training still assumes a 150-guest reception twenty minutes from home. That gap is why I wrote The Micro, Intimate & Destination Wedding Handbook, book seven in the Wedding Handbook series. It's 18 chapters, 90 worksheets and 432 full-colour pages on planning weddings that are smaller, further away, or both, and on building a business that does it well.

Here's what's inside, who it's for, and why I think small weddings are some of the best business in weddings.

Small doesn't mean simple

The biggest myth about micro weddings is that they're easier. Fewer guests, fewer problems, right? Not quite.

With twenty guests, every detail is visible. There's nowhere for a mediocre menu or a clumsy timeline to hide. Couples who choose small often choose it because they care deeply about the experience, so expectations per guest tend to go up, not down. Elopements bring their own logistics: permits, weather, remote locations, photographers who can hike.

The book opens with the wedding types couples are booking now, from micro and intimate weddings to elopements and adventure elopements, and what each one actually demands from a planner. Once you understand that, you can price and package it properly instead of treating a small wedding as a cut-down big one.

Destination fundamentals, done properly

Destination weddings are where good intentions meet paperwork. The handbook walks through the anatomy of a destination wedding, then gets into the parts that trip planners up:

• Legal, symbolic and religious ceremonies, and why couples often marry legally at home and celebrate abroad
• Cultures and customs, so you plan with respect for the place, not just a pretty backdrop
• Choosing the destination and the venue, with an eye on seasons, access and the guest experience

There's also The Destination Atlas: wedding locations by region, with seasons, watch-outs and ceremony notes. It's the reference section I wish I'd had on my desk years ago.

With twenty guests, every detail is visible. Small weddings don't lower the bar. They raise it per guest.

Planning from afar

The hardest part of a destination wedding isn't the beach. It's managing a budget, a timeline and a supplier team in a place you may have visited once. The middle of the book covers:

1. Destination and intimate budgets, including the costs couples forget, like guest travel support and local taxes
2. The planning timeline, which runs longer and front-loads more decisions than a local wedding
3. Building your team abroad, from vetting suppliers you've never met to agreeing how you'll communicate across time zones
4. Guests, travel and hospitality, because at a destination wedding you're partly a travel host

Then it moves into design with a sense of place, multi-day celebrations, wedding week on location, and what to do when things go wrong. Risk and safety get a full chapter, because when you're a long way from home, your contingency plan is the plan.

The business of small weddings

This is the bit I care about most. Small weddings can be excellent business, but only if you stop pricing them by headcount.

A micro wedding can take as many planning hours as a large one. A destination wedding usually takes more. If your fee is a percentage of a smaller total budget, you'll work harder for less. The final section of the book covers services, packages and pricing for intimate and destination work, and how to market it so the right couples find you.

It pairs naturally with what I teach in how to build wedding packages that actually sell, and with how to start planning destination weddings as a business if you're thinking of adding it as a service line.

Who it's for

I wrote it for:

• Planners adding elopements and destination weddings to their services
• Planners moving into micro and intimate weddings
• Celebrants, venues and travel professionals who work with these couples
• Anyone who wants to plan weddings anywhere in the world

If you're brand new to planning, I'd start with The Wedding Planner's Handbook for the foundations, then come here. If you want structured study with assessment, The Wedding Academy runs a Certificate in Intimate, Micro & Destination Weddings, 100% online, at weddingacademyglobal.com. We've trained more than 11,000 students since 2004, and I'm proud to own and lead the school today.

Ebook or paperback

The ebook is $49 and includes the worksheets, so you can use them with every couple. The paperback is $69 USD, printed in full colour through Blurb: order the paperback here. Plenty of planners buy both, keeping the paperback on the desk and the ebook on the laptop. All eight books in the series are on my books page.

How to use the worksheets

The 90 worksheets are the part planners tell me they use most, because they turn the chapters into a working process. There are questionnaires for your first conversation with a couple, shortlists for destinations and venues, budget templates that include the costs couples forget, and timelines built for planning from a distance.

My suggestion is simple. Read a chapter, then use its worksheets on a real or practice wedding straight away. If you're adding destination work to an existing business, pick one region from The Destination Atlas, build a sample timeline and budget for it, and you'll have the bones of a new package before you've taken a single booking. That's how a book becomes a service line rather than a nice read on the shelf.

If you'd like help shaping that new offer and pricing it properly, it's exactly the kind of work I do with planners in 1:1 coaching.

Explore the Micro, Intimate & Destination Wedding Handbook

FAQs

What is the difference between a micro wedding and an intimate wedding?

Definitions vary, but micro weddings generally mean a very small guest list, often under twenty or so, while intimate weddings are a little larger but still far smaller than a traditional reception. The handbook covers how to plan and price each.

Is planning destination weddings a good business?

It can be, if you price for the extra hours, travel and risk involved. Destination weddings take more planning time than local ones, so fees should reflect the work, not the guest count.

How do you plan a destination wedding from overseas?

Front-load the big decisions, build a vetted local supplier team, agree communication rules across time zones and plan a site visit where possible. The handbook includes worksheets for each stage.

Is The Micro, Intimate & Destination Wedding Handbook available in paperback?

Yes. The paperback is $69 USD through Blurb, printed in full colour, and the ebook is $49. Both cover the same 18 chapters.