Before jumping on a plane to a destination wedding, there are a few questions a couple should ask themselves to make sure a destination wedding is right for them.

Besides getting married in a beautiful place, and then spending your honeymoon there, what are the other advantages of the destination wedding?  A destination wedding provides more than a four or six hour experience with friends and loved ones.  Destination weddings usually last three or four days, making it a true celebration of love and life for both the couple and everyone involved.

The guest list is a lot smaller with a destination wedding, because you only invite close intimate friends and family and this makes the destination wedding seem more like a vacation celebration rather than a race to acknowledge 200 to 300 people in one evening.

If a couple chooses a Michigan outdoor wedding at an old castle, then they could plan Northern Michigan tours so the entire group has something to do for one of the days.    Many destination wedding sites have special group activities designed for wedding parties and medium to large sized groups of people that incorporate the wedding celebration into the weekend’s activities.

An organized bride, as well as a bride willing to relinquish some of the control over planning details, would be ideal for a destination wedding because it takes a lot of extra planning on the bride’s part  in addition to being able to coordinate with someone at the destination.  A bride and groom must also be flexible when planning a destination wedding which means they may not be able to get exactly what they want in flowers, wine, dinners or appetizers because these items are regional and may not be what they are used to.

In these economic hard times, people are spending their money more sensibly and trying to save money everywhere they can.  However, a fairytale

As a castle owner, you can align yourself with other businesses and their websites in order to offer a wide variety of items a bride and groom may need to make their fairytale wedding at your castle complete.  Offering free music downloads for wedding music or music to play at the reception is a good idea.  Offering links to discounts on floral arrangements, wedding decorations and centerpieces, balloons and bubbles, limousine rentals, tuxedo rentals and women’s formal wear, hairdressers and day spas for anything you think a bride and groom may want to use before their wedding would be a good idea to offer on your website.  By the same token, your website would be featured on each of these business’ websites thereby increasing your customer database.

Many people are willing to travel in order to save money for that once in a lifetime experience a wedding in a castle will offer them.  If you own a castle and offer destination weddings, you might want to offer free castle tours to bring in more customers who might want to hold other special events parties at your venue.  People are always looking for something that is free and a tour of your castle would not cost too much, just the salary of the tour guide but you will get more customers booking special events once they have seen the inside of the castle. The tour guide’s salary may outweigh what you receive in return.

In these economic hard times it may be difficult to advertise or market your business without spending a lot of money.  However, there are several places online to market your castle business without spending a lot of money or spending your money sensibly.  By using a marketing technique called search engine optimization or SEO, you can reach more customers by moving up the rankings on the three major search engines – Yahoo!, Google and MSN – simply by writing a keyword rich article about your castle and placing it on your website.  By having a high ranking website on the major search engines, you will find you have more customers visiting your websites which will translate to more customers booking weddings and special events parties at your castle.  Search engine optimization is a free marketing technique; all you have to do is have a website to place the article on.

Other marketing techniques that are free of charge and cost little to implement include article exchanges with other websites, posting your article to a blog about wedding destinations and website promotions through email listings.