The Destination Disconnect

The quote comes back and it is lower. Same head count, same standard of food, same length of day, and the property three hours out of town is asking thousands less than the room twenty minutes from your flat. You read it twice. Then you forward it to your mother with too many exclamation marks.

The number is real. The saving is not. A large block of cost has just moved off your spreadsheet and onto eighty credit cards belonging to people who will say yes because they love you, and who will never send you the total.

The invoice nobody writes

Every supplier quotes you accurately for what they sell. The venue quotes the venue, the caterer quotes the food, the photographer quotes the hours. Lay those documents side by side and your wedding is described down to the linen. Not one of them mentions how anybody gets there.

Now count the documents describing what the day costs the people invited to it. There are none. That ledger has no author and no due date, and it arrives in fragments across eight months, on eighty separate statements nobody adds together.

What a yes costs the person saying it

• Flights for two, booked late, because the save the date landed before anyone had leave approved.
• A hire car, because no bus goes to a farm gate.
• Two nights minimum, often three, because the ceremony is at four and nobody is driving home at midnight.
• Annual leave, which for a lot of people is the holiday they get that year, spent on your weekend.
• Childcare, or the cost of bringing the children and taking a second room.
• Clothes that work in that humidity, on that grass.

Nobody itemises this for the couple, and no guest is going to say it to your face. An invitation to a wedding two states away is not quite an invitation. It is a quiet request for money, and saying no costs something too, all of it paid by the person saying it: the cousin between jobs, the friend on one income, the aunt who will put the flights on a credit card rather than admit she cannot go.

None of this makes a destination wedding wrong. It makes it a decision with two budgets, one of which you are spending on other people's behalf without ever seeing the total.

The venues that say it out loud

A few venues put the transfer in writing. One lodge in the Victorian High Country, twenty minutes from Mansfield, publishes a sentence a city venue never has to write.

For everyone's safety, guest transport is by bus.

That is a safety rule, plainly stated, and the lodge recommends local bus companies, which is a kindness to anyone planning there. Nothing at the lodge is priced publicly; enquiry is a form. Read the rule with a budget open, though, and it turns into a line item. Somebody charters the coaches. There are 18 beds on the property, and everyone past the eighteenth sleeps somewhere else and is driven both ways. None of that reaches a venue quote, because none of it is the venue's to quote.

One Whitsundays island retreat solves the problem by refusing to have it. Weddings there are capped at 20 guests, and the private water transfers to the island are named as an inclusion rather than left for each guest to work out. No price is published; everything is quoted on enquiry. What the retreat does publish is a ceiling, and the ceiling is the honest part. Twenty is about the number of people for whom a flight, a boat and days away from work is a reasonable thing to ask.

One property on the coast at Princetown answers the same problem from the other end. It absorbs the accommodation instead of passing it on.

Accommodation is available on site for up to 190 guests before and after the wedding and reception. There is also a large range of nearby accommodation available that can be booked separately by your guests if they choose to stay elsewhere.

Beds for up to 190 people sit inside a $9,900 whole-property weekend. That figure buys the property for two nights and nothing else: catering, drinks and suppliers are on top, and the published price carries no date. The point is not the size of the number. It is which side of the line the beds fall on. Set it against 190 guests each booking two nights of their own. The beds get paid for either way. What changes is whose card they come off, and whether anybody had to be asked.

The one journey somebody actually priced

Here is the strange part. That arithmetic, the cost of getting one adult across the country to a wedding and into a bed for the night, has already been done and published. Just not for your guests.

One photographer works out of Healesville, in the Yarra Valley. His frequently asked questions hand you this before you have spoken to him at all.

Regional VIC (+2hrs drive from Healesville) - $250
Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Hobart - approx. $1000
Darwin, Perth - approx. $1500
Fiji, Bali, NZ - approx. $1500.

Each of those figures is an all-inclusive maximum rather than a fare: flights, taxis, car hire and one night's accommodation, the whole journey, capped. The radius is measured from Healesville, where he lives, not from Melbourne. And every line of it is the cost of one photographer getting to work and sleeping there. It is not what a seat on that flight costs your brother. Do not multiply it by eighty.

A second photographer, also out of Healesville, does the same thing flat, as an optional extra.

+$500 FOR DOMESTIC TRAVEL (WEDDINGS MORE THE 300KM FROM 3777) +$1,500 FOR INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL (WEDDINGS OUTSIDE AUSTRALIA)

3777 is Healesville. The radius is drawn on his own front door rather than a capital city, which is the honest way to draw it. Both men measure the journey outward from where they live, put a number on it, and publish it where a stranger can read it without asking. And in both cases that number is a supplier surcharge: what it costs the person you hired to reach the job and sleep there. It says nothing at all about what your aunt pays.

What it proves is that the sum can be done. Somebody worked out what it takes to get one person to Hobart, across town and into a bed for the night, and published the answer before anybody asked him for it. He did it for himself, which is fair enough; it is his business and his money. Nobody has done it for the eighty people you are about to send to the same town. No table, no cap, no figure of any kind, and nothing that arrives before the save the date does.

One cost you can actually delete

Of the two budgets, only one has a line you can delete outright, and it is yours. Hire people who already live there and the travel fee goes.

A Port Douglas photographer has covered the Douglas Shire since 1995, and publishes two wedding products, both elopement scale. A one hour Elopement Package at $548 returns a minimum of 60 edited high resolution images inside 48 hours. A Two Hour Elopement Package at $848 returns a minimum of 100, in 7 to 14 days. Anything longer, or anywhere beyond Port Douglas, is by quotation, and no full wedding day package is published.

That cuts both ways. Hiring local deletes the travel fee. It does not buy you a longer day. Those are the published products, built around a ceremony with a handful of people standing near it. If what you picture is a full day of coverage for a long guest list, that is a conversation and a quote, and the fee you saved has bought you no extra hours.

Who is selling the distance

54 venues in this directory sell themselves in the vocabulary of remoteness: island, outback, fly in, unsealed road, secluded. That is a count of how venues describe their own accessibility, not of drive times. And secluded is a promise made to the couple. To the guest trying to get there by six, it reads as something else entirely.

Among photographers, 128 sell travel as a product, Australia wide or worldwide, wherever the destination elopement happens to be. Set that against 93 who advertise the opposite, a radius they work inside. A couple marrying away from home is shopping in the first group. The two tables above show what those two photographers charge to get to work. Not a going rate, and not anybody's fare but their own. The distance still gets paid for twice: once on the invoices you sign, and again, unpriced, on everybody else's.

Say the number out loud

If you want the island, have the island. Nobody is arguing you out of marrying somewhere that means something to you. A twenty guest cap is one honest answer, and it is the answer of somebody who has already done the sum.

The other answer is open to everybody and costs nothing. Work out what two nights, a flight and a hire car actually come to from the cities your guests live in, the way a photographer works out what a job in Hobart costs him. Then put that figure in front of them before the save the date goes out. In the first line of the email, not on page four of a wedding website. Invite people knowing what you are asking of them. Some will come anyway and be glad they did. Some will send a card instead, and you will have made that an option rather than an embarrassment.

And if the total makes you flinch, that is the information. The cost was in the plan all along. It was just sitting on somebody else's copy of it.