The Reason Why We Chose a Cruise Wedding

My husband proposed to me August 2016 and a few weeks later we had the best life changing surprise of finding out I was pregnant with my son. The idea of planning a perfect wedding became the least of my priorities and I switched all of my attention on pregnancy. Two years later when my son was almost two we had our wedding on the Caribbean Sea.

I hope that my experience will help you plan your future trip, destination wedding, traveling with a toddler or all three!

Why did we decide to have a cruise wedding?

I went to a local wedding expo November 2016 to start planning my wedding.  I was ready and excited, but when I heard about venue rental pricing and started budgeting with the wedding and honeymoon I got stressed out and shut down.  When I say shut down- I mean I did not bring up the word wedding, planning, white, bride, big day for months.

Ryan’s 2017 New Years resolution was to plan our wedding and I gave in.  I wanted to be selfish and have a nice honeymoon – a first and last AMAZING vacation before we have more kids.  We decided to have a destination wedding because we could have the vacation and since we had guests across the country we could all travel. We knew that not a lot of family and friends would go, but since we have done everything backwards we thought why not have a non-traditional wedding? We thought of going to the Philippines, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Maldives- but again when budgeting we could not rationalize it and could see fewer and fewer guests attend.

My dad then brought up, why not get married on a cruise ship.  You have your destination wedding of traveling outside the US, you have the safety of your guests in a foreign country, the cruise is all inclusive with great service and no one can get lost and miss your wedding day.

With all the pros for a cruise we decided to bite the bullet and plan a cruise wedding.

Why Princess Cruise line?

When Ryan and I decided to have a cruise wedding we knew we wanted the Caribbean Sea, but did not know what Cruise line. Ryan and I have both been on cruises before. Ryan was on the Carnival Cruise line in 2009 and I have been on the Disney Cruise and Royal Caribbean. When reviewing the types of cruise ships we were debating between Royal Caribbean and Princess.  Both had great services Royal Caribbean is more family oriented and Princess serves more of the older crowd. We chose Princess because we wanted exceptional service on our wedding and vacation week.

Why we chose Regal?

Ryan and I wanted to have a newer ship, but not the biggest ship Royal where the cruise seemed over crowded.  The Regal is a newer ship so we had newer accommodations like the Medallion program has 1,346 crew passengers and 1,780 cabins so a little under 5,000 people on board.

Embarkment, Port, or Sea

We decided to have our wedding day on sea because we wanted to have our guests be able to enjoy the cruise. Typically on sea days cruisers are in the ship activities and it is crowded so we thought why not skip the crowded areas and have our wedding.  We had a group of 46 and 75% of the guests have never been on a cruise before so we wanted them to make the most of their vacation, we did not want them to miss a port because of wedding festivities. Ryan and I were really excited to go on the ports, but did not have any sentimental value in getting married on a specific piece of land.   We did not choose embarkment because we do not live in Florida where the ship disembark and none of our guests do, so that did not seem reasonable for guests to travel to have a 2 hour wedding before we boarded.

Photo Credit: Alex Shiu Photography