The Destination Disconnect

The quote comes back and it is lower. Same head count, same food, same length of day, and the property a few 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.

Every figure on that quote is right. What it cannot show you is the second budget that opened the moment you asked for it. Eighty credit cards belonging to people who will say yes because they love you, and who will never send you the total.

A wedding further away is not cheaper. It is cheaper for you.

The invoice nobody writes

The venue quotes the venue, the caterer quotes the food, the photographer quotes the hours, and between them they describe your wedding down to the linen. The journey your guests make is on none of those pages, because nobody is selling it.

Nobody writes that invoice and it still exists. Flights booked late, because the save the date landed before anybody had leave approved. A hire car, because no bus goes to a farm gate. Two nights, often three, because the ceremony is at four and nobody is driving home at midnight. Days of annual leave, which for a lot of people is the only holiday they get that year. Clothes that work in that heat, on that grass.

No guest is going to say any of that to your face. An invitation to a wedding a long way from home is a quiet request for money. Saying no costs something too: the friend on one income, the aunt who will put the flights on a credit card rather than admit she cannot afford to come.

A wedding away from home is not a mistake. It is a decision with two budgets, and only one arrives in your inbox with a total on the bottom.

The ones who say it out loud

Go far enough out and the journey stops being something each guest sorts out on their own. The venue has to organise it, and make it a condition of coming. There will have to be a bus, because a dark country road at midnight is no place for anybody to be driving. There will have to be a boat, or a transfer, or a second night booked because there is nothing to drive back to. A place remote enough to be worth going to has to solve all of that, and the good ones write it down while you can still plan around it.

A few go further and cap the guest list. A small maximum looks mean on a website, and it is honesty rather than meanness. It is a supplier saying out loud what most couples work out too late: a flight, a boat and three days off work is a large thing to ask of anybody, and a fair thing to ask of only so many people.

A photographer who works away from home has sat down and worked out what a journey costs: the fare, the taxi at the other end, the car, the night before. Some publish that sum before you enquire, which takes a little nerve and tells you the figure will not move once you are attached to the work. But what it costs one adult to get somewhere says nothing about what it costs eighty.

One cost you can actually delete

Of the two budgets, only yours has a line you can strike out completely, and that line is the supplier's travel charge. Hire the people who already live where you are marrying and it goes, because nobody is travelling.

The money is the least of it. Somebody who has worked one stretch of coast for twenty years knows what the light does there in November, and which half hour of a wet afternoon is worth shooting. None of that is on a price list and none of it can be flown in. She also sleeps in her own bed the night before, which is worth more on the morning than anybody puts in writing.

There is a limit to it. If you chose the place for a reason, some of what you want may not be for hire within an hour of it, and somebody whose work you love is worth the fare. But start from the town you are marrying in and work outward, rather than starting at home and dragging everybody along.

What the distance is for

None of this is an argument against going. You did not choose a place that happens to be a long way from everybody. You chose it because it is a long way from everybody. Island, outback, unsealed road, secluded: the words that make a place worth the trip all describe how hard it is to reach, and nobody is being tricked. A hundred people who came a long way to be there is a very good room to stand in.

The travel line on a supplier's quote is not a penalty for wanting her. Somebody is up at four to be on a headland by nine. The van has to be fuelled, the gear insured, the room the night before paid for, and her day is gone whether the drive was two hours or eight. Charging for that is arithmetic, not opportunism, and a supplier who prints the figure has done you a favour, because you can read it before you fall in love with the pictures.

What nobody can do is make the travel cost nothing. If the supplier does not absorb it, you pay it. If you do not, your guests pay it. It lands on somebody's invoice either way, and the only question is whether you saw it in time.

Say the number out loud

If you want the island, have the island. A short guest list is one honest answer to what that asks. Another is to decide that what you wanted was the small ceremony rather than the postcode, which is available twenty minutes from your own front door. Both are good days. They ask different things of the people you love.

One answer is open to everybody, and it costs nothing. Work out what two nights, a flight and a hire car come to from the cities your guests actually live in, the way a photographer prices her own journey before she quotes. 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 website. Some will come and be glad they did. Some will send a card instead, and you will have made that a choice rather than an embarrassment.

Book the people who have already published what their own travel costs. And if your own total makes you flinch, you have just found out what you were about to ask of eighty people. The cost was in the plan from the moment that first quote came back looking cheap. It was just sitting on somebody else's copy of it.