Tips for Planning Your Las Vegas Wedding

Las Vegas weddings are appealing to more and more people as the economy worsens since they offer a very cost effective and easy way to tie the knot quickly and with the most minimum hassle.  However, even though most wedding venues will greatly reduce your wedding planning stress, there are some that literally only provide you with the bare minimum marriage service while sticking you with the rest of the details.  

For example, if you are going with a very basic package at a chapel, then most of the time, they will not offer taking you to get your marriage license, photographing the ceremony, arranging for specific music, or flowers.  In other words, many chapels offer the very basic option of getting married and nothing really personalized or unique to you and your partner.  

If this doesn’t bother you, then you should stick to the basic chapel, but if it does and you feel that you’d like something more tailored to you and your spouse to be’s tastes, then you may be better off looking for a more full service chapel, or even a hotel that happens to offer marriage services as well.  Many of the bigger hotels in Vegas offer wedding services, and they offer packages to suit your budget, but also to suit your personal tastes and needs.

Not only that, but many times if you book your wedding at a hotel, they may offer discounts off of their rooms or extracurricular services.  They will also many times give you your own personal wedding planner/consultant that will help you through every step of you wedding planning process.  This not only takes all the hassle out of your wedding, but it also brings things to your attention on a personalized basis, that you may not have thought of before.

We recently planned our wedding in Vegas, and found that after searching through all kinds of chapels, that after you added on the expense of doing everything else for you wedding, such as photography, flowers, music, the license and officiant’s fee to perform the ceremony, it was better and more hassle free to just pay the extra money and have a consultant that would go through the process every step of the way with you and make sure it was all planned and ready to go on your special day.

This is a great option for people like me, who hate planning things and who get stressed out when faced with too many options and too many “to do’s” on their list.  After we booked our wedding in the hotel chapel, we only had to make a few decisions, which our wedding planner then followed through on for us, so it was like having your own personal shopper in a way!  

Another consideration for you Vegas wedding is whether or not you are going to invite others to come with you to participate in the marriage of you and your future spouse.  This is a totally personal decision, and one that really depends on how you and your partner feel about the experience of sharing your happy day with friends and loved ones.

Some want minimal fuss and attention, and choose to “run off to Vegas” and elope, while others, like us, had decided to make it an open invitation to others if they wanted to come on a vacation and also participate in our wedding.  You’d be surprised how many people are willing to come and pay their own way to see your marriage, but also to have fun and live it up a little on their own personal sort of vacation at the same time.  

In Vegas, you can have fun on your own, but it’s always more fun going with a group of people in my opinion.  It’s all a matter of personal preference.  If you do invite others who are paying their own way, you may want to consider having a small gathering after the wedding ceremony as a sort of “reception” for those who attended, so you may want to look into restaurants that are reasonable, and decide if you are going to foot the bill or not. This is entirely up to you and your budget of course, it’s just a good thing to think about ahead of time.  

Getting married in Sin City really does take a lot of the forethought and hassle out of planning a wedding, but there are still some considerations to be made, and as long as you’re aware of those decisions, then that makes it all that much easier and stress free for you and your special someone on the day that shapes the rest of your lives together.